The push pull legs routine, or “PPL split,” is a weightlifting program that has you do three kinds of workouts:
- Push
- Pull
- Legs
This routine has been carefully drafted to separate the different major muscle groups into three separate workouts:
- Push workout focuses on the Chest, shoulders, and triceps. This kind of workout revolves around barbell and dumbbell bench pressing, overhead (military) pressing, dipping, and doing isolation exercises for your triceps.
- Pull focuses on the Back and biceps (with a bit of hamstrings as well if you’re deadlifting). These workouts generally revolve around deadlifting, barbell and dumbbell rowing, pulldowns, pullups and chin-ups, and doing isolation exercises for your biceps.
- Legs. These workouts focus on training your quads, hamstrings, glutes, and calves with exercises like squatting, lunging, and doing various isolation exercises for each major muscle group.
It has become one of the most popular and proven workout splits of all time, particularly for intermediate and advanced trainees with the goal of building muscle.
Benefits:
- This routine keeps all related muscle groups together in the same workout, which is fantastic for preventing the type of overlap issues that are so common with less-intelligent splits.
- Better muscle recovery and/or less overuse injuries.
- Most convenient and easy-to-schedule for most people, and it’s the least likely to cause any recovery related issues.
- Idle for those whose primary goal now is to simply maintain the amount of muscle and strength you currently have rather than making additional progress, training each muscle group once per week will usually be enough for that purpose.
Keep in Mind
- Stretching and foam rolling is recommended on this program to aid the boost the recovery process.
- Keep Adding on strength sets: The reason for the inclusion of these strength sets is that the advanced trainer should be looking to lift more each session be it by a rep or by an increase of 0.5kg. This is known as ‘progressive overload ‘which means if you’re getting stronger each session you will be growing each session and vice versa. So, adding in some strength sets will aid this.
- Keep a Log
- Take Home Message
If you wish to put on mass and building strength, give push, pull and legs a try.