What s up guys, Jeff Cavaliere, athleanx.com. So ever since I made this video talking about
the best splits for building muscle? People have asked me to do a little bit of a deeper dive,
to talk about more in depth, some popular splits. And there's no more popular split these days than
this right here, The PPL or Push-Pull Legs. We've been doing this for a long time here at Athlean-X,
but it's been done for decades, actually, probably centuries. Probably even the cavemen
were doing Push-Pull Legs. Me like Push-Pull Legs.
So, it's been around a while. But instead of just focusing on all the good things about it,
let's talk about even some of the things that may not be so ideal so that you can
make a more informed decision about whether or not Push-Pull Legs is for you, at least
at this point in your training. So we talk about Push-Pull Legs, but really that's where my first
issue comes in with this. What I like to do is actually flip those around, so we have Pull-Push
Legs, and it's a very important reason why I want to do that, and I'll get to that in a second.
But when we talk about how we would split this out over a training week, we actually have about
four options. There's really more than that, but the most popular are going to be either
a six-day training split where you train for six consecutive days and an off day at the end,
something known as a synchronous split. Or we have three days in a row with an off day in the middle
and then three consecutive days again, which is an asynchronous split. But there's are two
six-day splits of this training split. We have three-day options as well. Monday,
Wednesday, Friday. And something I like to do, a lot of times our athletes do which is Monday,
Thursday, Friday with a few days in between. Now the big thing that should stick out to you here,
as the first major pro of PPL is the flexibility of focus. I could actually do a lot of different
things with a PPL split. I can focus on building my strength or hypertrophy with either of
these six-day splits. It gives me a good chance to get appropriate volume,
right? Leg training s going to hit twice a week and the ability to choose through the exercise I
use. Or the loads I use the option for going for more strength or hypertrophy or even both.
Down here, the three-day splits are actually great too, and they also introduce some
variability here too, because on these days, in between my major strength training workouts,
I can work on other things. Again, I can work on my general fitness levels and my conditioning.
I could do that without really affecting my strength training workouts. I also have,
as I said, the athlete s ability as they approach a season to work on some skill work or speed,
agility and quickness, right? Or even again, additional conditioning that s not going to
impact their major strength training workouts, so definitely some flexibility to focus.
But my big thing, I think that jumps out at me when we're talking about PPL versus something
like, let's say, a Bro Split or an isolation-based workout approach, is the functional efficiency
here. We're talking about shared motor patterns, allowing muscles to work together that actually
prefer to work together, rather than trying to isolate them with the purpose being
hypertrophy through focus and efficiency. If I'm doing a standard dumbbell curl, I'm actually
trying to keep the forearms out of the movement by bending the wrist slightly backwards to allow
the biceps to do more of the work. Even though we know that the function of bringing the arm up and
closer is something the biceps and forums are share. In a PPL we're allowing our body to work
that way, so the efficiency is what's allowing us to actually do some really incredible things here.
If I look at the exercises that make up the Push-Pull Leg workouts, all it does is reflect
exactly what I just said. On a push day you're talking about a bench in an overhead press where
you have the chest, the shoulders and triceps, muscles that actually like to collaborate together
through their functions to a common shared goal. On a pull day, a Deadlift or a Weighted Chin. You
can take that Weighted Chin again and compare that to that Bicep Curl. You can see that I'm
allowing my lats to work together with my biceps to get my chest up over that bar.
The legs would be comprised of Squats, and let's say maybe you have a Barbell Lunge. But the
idea here is where you quickly glimpse at these exercises, because of this collaborative effort,
we're actually very easily able to load these exercises and progressively overload these.
That works really, really well with building strength as a focus, like I said. But when we
go back to how we structure these and lay them out together, this is where sort of that first
issue comes, right? The Push-Pull Legs, with my focus being right here.
It's that adjacency of those two that bothers me where I want to take it and split this to a pull
push legs. Because what I've done is I've split up these two workouts so that I'm not deadlifting and
squatting back-to-back. It's one of the important things I think we should really try to do.
That being said, if I don't play that out over the course of the week, that's where you start
to see the first issue. It's that these two will run up against each other the second time around.
And that's where we talk about an impact on recovery through this six-day split, if you even
were to set it up this way as Pull-Push Legs. If I come in here and look at the actual workout
itself, though, I realize quickly that with every con, there's also sometimes an opportunity to do
something to turn it into a pro. So you don't have to do the same pull workout every time it comes
up. In this workout here and actually the perfect PPL workout that I put together for you guys
on this channel, you're going to want to check out and I'll link for you at the end of this video.
We actually had two variations of the pool workout, this is just pull one. And on the
first day, yes, I'm doing my barbell deadlifts, which would be back on that Monday workout. But
the second time around, I'm able to change that. I could actually change the deadlift variation
where I can go to one that's not going to be as loaded as heavy, like a Snatch Grip Deadlift,
and I could actually change the loading parameter. So instead of doing a 1 x 5 before,
I could actually do a 3 x 5 with a weight that I could actually handle for eight reps. So I
could decrease the strain and the stress that I'm encountering during the exercise, or I don't even
have to do that at all if I don't want to. I could just simply shift my focus to the Weighted pullup
as an alternative heavy pole exercise and just increase this volume a little bit if need be.
But there's flexibility even within the workouts themselves, you don't always have to stick to
the same workout. As a matter of fact, I highly encourage you don't. But let's say we go back
to this now. Well, the good thing about this is this off day being situated right here at
the end of every week. Because what that does is it gives you a predictability of scheduling
and a lot of us that run into trouble with our training splits because we can't stick to them,
which is always a big problem, consistency is key. You want to make sure you have the ability
through your schedule, either dictated by family needs or dictated by your work schedule,
that you could actually hit your workouts every time they are supposed to be done.
Well, this would give you that opportunity. If I were to change this to the off day in between,
which is that asynchronous split, well, the first thing is the good thing, more recovery. So that I
had the recovery between pulling legs the first time around and now by putting the off day here,
I've introduced another day in between legs and pulls. So, no matter where we go, legs over here
off day here, I'm always going to have a little bit of additional recovery in between
sessions. The downside to this is that we actually have that rotating off day. So,
this could be a little challenging for those people that have a very fixed schedule and wind
up having to have their workouts always moving. What's going to happen is the pull day that was
scheduled for week one on Monday is now going to move to week two. And then from
there it's going to move to Wednesday on week three and then to Thursday on week four. So,
if your schedule doesn't allow for that, you might run into some trouble here,
although this would be a better version. Now, if we're looking at these two splits here,
you can see that recovery is actually built into this split. One of the biggest cons that
people point to is that they don't think this is a good split for maximizing recovery, and I tend to
disagree. Let's say I have a workout here, a push workout, right? In between push workouts on this
synchronous split, I have one, two and three off days before I come back and hit push again, right?
Even if I'm doing the synchronous split and I have my push day here, I have one two and I'm back on
the third day. That's a good amount of recovery, especially when you're training six days a week
to build in to what you're doing to allow yourself to be ready for every workout. That being said,
even if you still had some issues here, you were still, let's say, run down on push day.
Let's take an example push workout push that you had some added desire to build up your tricep.
So you did some additional tricep focus work at the end, which is an option that a lot of
people choose to do. Another pro, by the way, easily built into this workout. If you did this
on the first push day and you came back and you were sore, your triceps for sore, and you were
worried about your recovery, well, you could do a few things right off the bat. Number one, you're
not going to do a direct tricep work here, you're going to shift the exercise and swap them out.
And the first thing I might do is pull in a corrective exercise instead. And the thing
I would actually recommend is a Face Pull. And I understand a pull. I'm pushed a is maybe not what
you would necessarily jump to. But first of all, there's always room for Face Pulls and secondly,
I actually particularly like doing pulling based corrective exercises. I'm pushing days
because we get so much of that pushing focus it helps to sort of counterbalance that. So
you can put a different exercise in here. If you wanted to do something different than the
triceps here, you could do another chest focused exercise or even a shoulder focused exercise that
just didn't have the additional contribution of the triceps or as much of a contribution
to the triceps. So instead of doing a pushup here, what you do maybe as a crossover right
to minimize the tricep contribution, realizing that you're already a little bit run down.
Same thing here. If I wanted to make it a shoulder exercise instead of doing some other
pressing variation, I'll just do another front raise, minimizing the tricep contribution. So,
there are even ways that I can work that in without having that be a problem.
On the three-day splits here, again, I talked about the main benefit being having the ability
to easily schedule in additional things that we can do to increase our overall fitness level.
On a perfect three day split here. You can introduce conditioning on these days here, and
I'm talking about overall conditioning that's just meant to increase your heart rate, improve your
endurance, that's not going to impact negatively your workout in the middle. Because here it
doesn't necessarily matter, by the way. If you set this up as Push-Pull and Legs
or as Push, Legs and Pull, the order isn't really affected here because we have that off
day in between. But if you had a leg day here and you were surrounding it with conditioning work,
you'd want that conditioning work to be stuff that's not necessarily eccentrically loaded,
right? That's not going to overtax you, so jump rope, sled pushing,
that doesn't leave you sore for the next day. As a matter of fact, one of the best benefits,
even if you had a leg day in the middle here is a flush based conditioning to follow it,
so it's going to actually help you to recover from your leg workouts. So that's the main focus.
But I mentioned here when we're trying to train athletes, particularly as they approach their
season, you still have to leave room for their skill work. You still have to leave room for
them to hit in the cages or field ground balls from my baseball past, right? You need to have
opportunities for them to work on speed, agility and quickness. We have plenty of flexibility in
here and you're going to see we can actually insulate the workout here. So I would, in this
case, make sure this was once again pull, make sure this is legs and make sure this is push.
And you'll see that from our own program, All American Muscle, we do just that.
We have a pull and then legs and push. And the reason why we do that is for the focus of trying
to insulate these leg days from the other work. So, I precede it with a rest day after doing my
speed work on Tuesday, and then I come back with a push focus strength training workout. So, I'm
insulating that legwork. I'm not impacting that negatively, I'm not taking a risk of impacting
my leg training or my strength training for my legs by butting up against any type of focused
conditioning work that could be, you know, leg heavy. So, this is really a nice split.
But really what we're talking about PPL there s a few other general problems that people want
to talk about. Like the cons that people point to oftentimes, I think we need to address. The first
is people say, it's only three days a week. Well, it's obviously not. I just gave you two options
for six-day splits here, this one or this one. They'll then say that, well, you're doing two days
of upper for only one day of lower. Well, again, when you look at the focus of those days, you
actually aren't doing that either. You're actually focusing on agonistic muscles that like to pull
and agonistic muscles that like to push and then legs. So, you have three major focuses that each
get done two times a week. So there really is no disparity here. And plus when we consider the fact
that we're actually deadlifting on pull day, I think that really counters that argument, too.
The next thing is people will talk about is that it's harder to incorporate
intensity techniques when you're doing a Push-Pull Legs. I don't see that. As a matter of fact,
I think you could easily incorporate intensity techniques if you wanted to.
You could do eccentrically focused exercises on, let's say, pull day, right? Slow eccentrics on a
way to pull up or on a lat, pull down and easily come back because again, you've got plenty of off
days in between to allow you to do that. Whereas if you were doing a total body split, that would
become a lot more challenging because now you're looking at Monday, Wednesday, Friday, say,
for three total body workouts. Anything that I do one day with a knee centric focus that leaves me
to serve for Wednesday's workout could negatively impact my ability to perform that workout. You're
getting much more flexibility built in here, so I don't really agree with that point.
And then the final thing is they'll say, well, if you have to address your weak points,
like I pointed out before, with tricep focus exercises at the end of that push workout, well,
it's just going to increase your workout length. Okay, fair point. In other words, in order to
add a couple exercises there, you're going to add to your workout length. If I was following a bro
split, let's say chest and then back and then let's say shoulders, and then I wanted to come
in and do an additional chest workout because I want to work on a weak point of chest. You're not
necessarily increasing workout length, you're just sticking another chest workout into the overall
plan, which is just going to extend that training week out. But you're not increasing the length of
any particular workout. Fair point, but again, how much you really impacting that workout by
just adding a couple of exercises to the end of your push workout in the case of the triceps.
So, guys, when we talk about all this together, is the push pull leg split a good split?
It absolutely is. There's a lot of benefits to the workout split. You're talking about
the flexibility of focus, namely the ability to follow it in either a schedule that works
with your own schedule or one that is more flexible if you don't have a rigid schedule.
The opportunity to be more than just a strength training athlete or a hypertrophy focused person
and do athletic training as well. There's so much variability built into this, and most of all, that
recovery built into whatever variation of this you do is really one of the main elements that's going
to drive your success by following this split. Now, is it the only split? Of course not. There
are so many more splits out there, guys. If you want me to cover more of them, make sure you leave
your comments below and I will do that in a future video here. If you're looking for this split,
actually, we build it into many of our Athlean-X programs, but it's in our All-American Muscle
program available over at Athelanx.com. And if you find the video helpful, make sure you leave
your comments and thumbs up below. Again, if you want me to do more make sure you tell me below.
And also, guys, if I haven't done so, make sure you click Subscribe, turn on your notifications
so you never miss a new video when we put one out. All right, guys, see you soon.