Push Pull Legs for Beginners: The Complete PPL Split Explained (With a Week of Workouts)

You have watched the videos. The push pull legs split looks like the routine serious lifters run, six days a week, mirror pumped, and you assume it is out of your league until you have a year under the bar. So you stick to a vague full-body plan and quietly wonder if you are leaving results on the table.

Here is the thing the videos skip. PPL is not advanced because the moves are hard. It is popular with intermediates because it scales cleanly, and that same trait is exactly what makes it a clean place for a beginner to start. You do not need six days. You need a structure that lets each muscle group get worked often enough, and PPL gives you that at three days a week just as well as at six.

This is a plain guide to what push pull legs is, who it suits, and a full week of workouts with named exercises, sets and reps. No jargon, no gatekeeping.

Build your PPL plan with Pocket Fit. It writes the split around your goal, your equipment and the days you can actually train, then handles the weight progression for you. Free on the App Store and Google Play, no card needed.

What push pull legs actually means

A PPL split sorts every exercise into one of three days by the movement pattern it uses, not the body part it hits.

Push covers everything where you press weight away from you. That is chest, shoulders and triceps, because those three muscles all fire together on a bench press or an overhead press.

Pull covers everything where you drag weight towards you. That is back and biceps, because a row or a chin-up trains both at once.

Legs covers the lower body. Quads, hamstrings, glutes and calves, driven by squats, hinges and lunges.

The logic is that muscles which already work together get trained together, so you are not doing chest on Monday and triceps on Thursday and hitting the triceps twice by accident. Each day flows, and each muscle gets a full recovery window before its next turn.

Who a PPL routine is really for

Be honest about the reputation. The push pull legs workout plan gets talked about as an intermediate routine, and there is truth in that. The classic version runs six days a week, which is a lot of gym time and a lot of recovery to manage. A raw beginner does not need that volume, and jumping straight to six days is a good way to get sore, bored, and gone by week three.

But the structure underneath is beginner friendly, and here is how you run it as one. You start with a 3 day split: Push, Pull, Legs, spread across the week with a rest day between most sessions. That hits every major muscle once a week to begin with, which is plenty while your body is still learning the movements.

Then, when three days feels easy and your lifts are climbing, you double it. You run Push, Pull, Legs, then Push, Pull, Legs again, six sessions across six or seven days. Now every muscle gets trained twice a week. That is the version people picture, and you have earned your way into it rather than being thrown in.

The reason this progression matters is not motivation. It is dose, and that is where the evidence gets specific.

Twice a week beats once, and PPL is built for it

The single most useful finding for a beginner choosing a split comes from Schoenfeld, Ogborn and Krieger, who pooled ten studies for the journal Sports Medicine. They compared training a muscle group once a week against twice a week, with the total amount of work held equal, and measured muscle growth.

Twice a week won. The higher frequency produced a larger effect on muscle size, 0.49 against 0.30 for once a week. Same total sets, better result, purely from spreading them across two sessions instead of one.

That is the case for the 6 day split in one sentence. When you run PPL twice through the week, every muscle gets its two touches, which the research says is the sweet spot. The 3 day version is where you begin. The 6 day version is where the frequency advantage kicks in, and PPL is one of the tidiest ways to reach it without your sessions ballooning to two hours.

Let Pocket Fit handle the frequency. Tell it how many days you can train and it builds a 3 day or 6 day PPL that keeps each muscle on schedule. Free on iOS and Android.

A full week of push pull legs workouts

Here is a complete beginner week. Everything is a compound-first layout: the big lifts come first while you are fresh, the smaller isolation work fills in after. Rest 90 seconds to two minutes between hard sets, a little less on the isolation moves.

For the 3 day version, do Push A, Pull A and Legs A across the week. For the 6 day version, add the B days and run all six.

Push A

• Barbell bench press: 3 sets of 8 to 10
• Seated dumbbell shoulder press: 3 sets of 8 to 10
• Incline dumbbell press: 3 sets of 10 to 12
• Cable lateral raise: 3 sets of 12 to 15
• Triceps rope pushdown: 3 sets of 12 to 15

Pull A

• Lat pulldown: 3 sets of 8 to 10
• Barbell bent-over row: 3 sets of 8 to 10
• Seated cable row: 3 sets of 10 to 12
• Face pull: 3 sets of 15
• Dumbbell biceps curl: 3 sets of 12 to 15

Legs A

• Barbell back squat: 3 sets of 8 to 10
• Romanian deadlift: 3 sets of 8 to 10
• Leg press: 3 sets of 10 to 12
• Seated leg curl: 3 sets of 12 to 15
• Standing calf raise: 3 sets of 15 to 20

Push B

• Seated barbell overhead press: 3 sets of 8 to 10
• Flat dumbbell press: 3 sets of 8 to 10
• Machine chest fly: 3 sets of 12 to 15
• Dumbbell lateral raise: 3 sets of 12 to 15
• Overhead triceps extension: 3 sets of 12 to 15

Pull B

• Chin-up or assisted chin-up: 3 sets to near failure
• Chest-supported row: 3 sets of 10 to 12
• Single-arm dumbbell row: 3 sets of 10 to 12
• Rear delt fly: 3 sets of 15
• Cable biceps curl: 3 sets of 12 to 15

Legs B

• Front squat or goblet squat: 3 sets of 8 to 10
• Walking lunge: 3 sets of 10 to 12 each leg
• Hip thrust: 3 sets of 10 to 12
• Lying leg curl: 3 sets of 12 to 15
• Seated calf raise: 3 sets of 15 to 20

That is roughly five exercises a day, three working sets each. It is enough to grow on and short enough to finish in under an hour. If a machine is taken or an exercise does not suit you, swap it for one that trains the same pattern.

Progressive overload is the part that actually grows you

The split organises your week. It does not, on its own, make you bigger. What makes you bigger is progressive overload, which is the plain idea that the work has to get harder over time or your body has no reason to change.

In practice it is small. You add a little weight to the bar, or one more rep, or one more set, whenever the last session felt manageable. Hit the top of your rep range on all sets, put the weight up a notch next time, and start again at the bottom of the range. That slow creep, week after week, is the whole game.

Volume matters too, and the same research group put a number on it. Schoenfeld, Ogborn and Krieger, writing in the Journal of Sports Sciences, pooled fifteen studies and found a graded dose-response: higher weekly volume beat lower volume by a 3.9% greater gain in muscle size, with each extra weekly set adding a little more. More sets, up to a point, means more growth. That is why the 6 day PPL, run sensibly, tends to out-build the 3 day version once you can recover from it.

The catch is that adding weight and adding sets forever is not sustainable, and knowing when to push, when to hold, and when to back off is the fiddly part most beginners get wrong.

Where the evidence runs thin

Two honest caveats before you treat any of this as law.

First, these meta-analyses lean on trained and untrained subjects mixed together, mostly younger, mostly male, over training blocks of weeks and months rather than years. The frequency review pooled just ten studies, and the authors themselves flag that whether three times a week beats twice is still unsettled. The volume finding is real but modest: a few percentage points, not a transformation, and the studies stop measuring long before you would.

Second, no meta-analysis knows your recovery, your sleep, your job or your joints. The 6 day split is optimal on paper and a fast route to burnout for someone sleeping six hours and working on their feet. The honest version of the advice is that twice-a-week frequency and a slow volume creep are strong defaults, not guarantees, and the right dose is the one you can actually repeat. If your nights are short, our piece on training on poor sleep covers what to change and what to keep.

Where Pocket Fit fits

The reason a beginner drifts off a PPL split is rarely the exercises. It is the admin. Which day am I on, how much did I lift last time, do I add weight now or hold, and what happens to the week when I miss Wednesday.

Pocket Fit does that admin. It builds the split around your goal, your equipment and the number of days you can genuinely train, so you get a 3 day or 6 day PPL that fits your life rather than a generic one you have to force. It handles progressive overload for you: it tracks what you lifted, tells you when to nudge the weight up, and updates the plan week to week from what you log, so the slow creep the research rewards happens without you having to keep the spreadsheet.

Miss a session and the scheduler reshuffles it into the rest of the week instead of dropping it, so a busy Wednesday does not cost you a whole muscle group's frequency. And if an exercise does not suit you, the AI coach swaps it for one that trains the same pattern from a single sentence. The Body budget keeps a running tally of the deposits that actually move you forward, your workout, your streak, your sleep and your nutrition, so you can see the week adding up rather than guessing.

Put it together

Push pull legs is not an advanced secret. It is a clean way to organise your training so the same muscles get worked together and rested properly. You start it as a 3 day split while you learn the lifts, then double it to a 6 day split once you can recover, because training each muscle twice a week grew more than once a week, 0.49 against 0.30, in the pooled evidence. Progressive overload, a slow creep in weight and sets, is what turns the structure into results, with higher volume worth about 3.9% more growth than lower.

None of that requires you to be an expert. It requires you to show up, add a little, and not lose the thread when life gets in the way. Pocket Fit exists because the founder lost the thread plenty of times himself. He went from 122 kg to competing at The Yard Games, dropping 38 kg along the way, and built the app around the messy weeks rather than the perfect ones. You can read that story on our story page.

Start with Pocket Fit, free. Tell it your goal and your days, and it builds your push pull legs plan and runs the progression for you. Personalised in minutes on iOS and Android.

Push pull legs for beginners: common questions

Is push pull legs good for a complete beginner?

Yes, as long as you start with the 3 day version. Push, Pull and Legs once each across the week teaches you the main movement patterns without overloading your recovery. You move up to the 6 day split later, once your lifts are climbing and three days feels easy.

How many days a week should I run PPL?

Begin with 3 days a week, one Push, one Pull, one Legs. Progress to 6 days once you can recover from it, running the cycle twice so each muscle is trained twice weekly. That twice-a-week frequency produced a larger effect on muscle size, 0.49 against 0.30 for once a week, in the pooled research.

What is the difference between a 3 day and 6 day PPL split?

The 3 day split hits each muscle group once a week and suits beginners and busy schedules. The 6 day split runs the same three days twice, so every muscle gets two sessions a week, which the evidence links to more growth. The exercises are the same; the 6 day version just adds frequency and volume.

How does progressive overload work on a PPL routine?

You make the work slightly harder over time. When you hit the top of your rep range on every set, add a little weight next session and start again at the bottom of the range. Pooled data found higher weekly volume beat lower by about 3.9% in muscle growth, so slowly adding sets and weight is what drives progress.

Which muscles does each PPL day train?

Push trains chest, shoulders and triceps, the muscles that press weight away from you. Pull trains back and biceps, the muscles that drag weight towards you. Legs trains quads, hamstrings, glutes and calves through squats, hinges and lunges.

References

1. Schoenfeld, B. J., Ogborn, D., & Krieger, J. W. (2016). Effects of Resistance Training Frequency on Measures of Muscle Hypertrophy: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Sports Medicine, 46(11), 1689-1697. DOI: 10.1007/s40279-016-0543-8
2. Schoenfeld, B. J., Ogborn, D., & Krieger, J. W. (2017). Dose-response relationship between weekly resistance training volume and increases in muscle mass: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Sports Sciences, 35(11), 1073-1082. DOI: 10.1080/02640414.2016.1210197

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Pocket Fit is a fitness and wellbeing app, not a medical device. It does not diagnose, treat or prevent any condition. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before starting or changing a training or nutrition programme, and if you have persistent problems with sleep, pain or fatigue.

Georgi, founder of Pocket Fit. He went from 122 kg to competing at The Yard Games, having lost 38 kg along the way.