Push | Pull | Legs Routine - Pros and Cons (FULL BREAKDOWN!)

If you have ever wondered what the pros and cons of a PPL split are, then you’ve come to the right place. In this video, I am going to break down the benefits and drawbacks of one of today’s most popular workout splits - push, pull, legs. The PPL split is nothing new but has gained recent popularity

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 opportuni