Endeva

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Push / Pull / Legs

A way of organising a training week, rather than a fixed set of numbers.

What it is

A split. The week is divided into three kinds of session by the movement involved rather than by the muscle: everything you press goes on the push day, everything you pull goes on the pull day, and the lower body gets its own day.

The important thing to understand about it is that it is a container, not a scheme. The other programs in this section tell you how many sets, at what percentage, in which week. Push / Pull / Legs tells you none of that. It tells you what goes with what, and leaves the numbers to be filled in.

That makes this article a bit different from the others. There is no table to print, because there is nothing fixed to put in one.

Where it came from

There is no author and no original text. Grouping training by pushing, pulling and legs is old bodybuilding practice, arrived at independently by a lot of people for the obvious reason that it is the most natural way to divide the body up if you are training more than twice a week.

The three way split spread widely through online lifting communities from the 2000s onward, where several specific versions with prescribed exercises and set counts became popular in their own right. Those specific versions belong to the people who wrote them. The split itself belongs to nobody, and that is what this article is about.

The structure

Three sessions, run in order, with the day content grouped by movement pattern:

Push

Horizontal pressing, vertical pressing, and the triceps and front and side shoulder work that supports both. A typical session anchors on a barbell bench press or an overhead press, adds a second press at a different angle such as an incline press, and finishes with direct shoulder and triceps work.

Pull

Vertical pulling, horizontal pulling, and the biceps and rear shoulder work that supports both. A typical session anchors on a pull up or lat pulldown plus a row, and finishes with direct arm and upper back work.

Legs

A squat pattern, a hinge pattern, usually something single legged, and calves. A typical session anchors on a barbell squat and a Romanian deadlift or deadlift, then adds split squats or leg press and accessory work.

At three days a week each pattern is trained once. At six days the whole cycle runs twice, which is where most of the popular versions live. Four and five day arrangements exist too and simply rotate through the three sessions without lining up neatly with the calendar week.

Why it is built that way

Two things are being managed: how often you train each pattern, and whether the work you did yesterday is going to compromise the work you do today.

Grouping by movement handles the second neatly. The muscles that fatigue on a push day are largely the ones that get the next two days off, so a heavy pressing session does not sit underneath a rowing session the following morning. Compare that with splitting by muscle in the older bodybuilding style, where a chest day and a shoulder day on consecutive days share a great deal of the same tissue, and each one arrives partly pre-fatigued.

It also concentrates the supporting work usefully. Triceps get trained on the day you press, when they are already warm and already working. Biceps get trained on the day you pull. You are not adding a session for arms; you are putting the arm work where it belongs.

The first thing, frequency, is where the split earns its flexibility. The same three sessions cover a beginner training three days a week and an experienced lifter training six, with the only difference being how many times the cycle runs. That matters because weekly volume is the variable most tied to muscle growth, and the practical ceiling on weekly volume is how much you can do in one session without quality falling off. Running the cycle twice is simply the standard way of buying more volume without making any single session absurd.

How progression works without a table

With no prescribed percentages, progression has to come from what you did last time. The standard mechanism is double progression: pick a rep range, and when you hit the top of it for all your sets, add weight and drop back to the bottom of the range.

Say a movement is programmed for 3 sets of 8 to 12. You work in that range until you can complete 12 on all three sets with a rep or two still in reserve. Then you add the smallest useful increment and start again nearer 8. On a compound lift this might happen every couple of weeks; on a small isolation movement it might take longer, which is fine and expected.

In Endeva, a Push / Pull / Legs program works this way rather than from a fixed table. Weights are anchored to what you have actually logged for that movement, so the program starts where you are rather than where a percentage chart thinks you should be, and the prescriptions move as your logged results move. Because the progression is a steady ramp rather than a sequenced peaking cycle, it also adapts: if the recent weeks say a target is too much, what gets served adjusts rather than repeating a number you have already missed twice.

Six weeks is a natural block length for this, and unlike a peaking cycle it repeats. There is no test day and no end point, because there is nothing to peak for.

What the evidence says

The split itself is one of the better studied things in this section, mostly because "does how you divide the week matter?" is an easy question to run trials on.

The short answer is that it matters less than people assume. Once total weekly volume is held equal, splitting a week one way rather than another has a modest effect on strength outcomes at best (Grgic and colleagues, 2018). What does have a reasonably clear graded relationship with muscle growth is how many hard sets you do per week (Schoenfeld and colleagues, 2017).

So the honest framing is that Push / Pull / Legs is not magic. Its value is that it is a convenient and low friction way to organise a lot of weekly volume across a number of sessions you can actually attend, while keeping consecutive days from interfering with each other. That is a real benefit and it is a logistical one rather than a physiological one.

The claim that the specific push, pull, legs grouping beats other sensible groupings such as upper and lower is not something the research supports. Pick whichever fits your week.

Who it suits, who it does not

It suits anyone past the point where a simple full body routine is still adding weight every session, who mainly wants to build size, and who can train at least three times a week.

It suits people whose schedule is unpredictable, because the cycle rotates rather than being pinned to particular weekdays. If you miss Wednesday, you do Wednesday's session on Thursday and carry on. Nothing breaks.

It suits people who want to train more. Going from three days to five or six is a change in how many times the cycle runs, not a change of program.

It does not suit a true beginner especially well. If you can still add weight to a squat every session, a simpler full body routine three times a week will get you further faster with less time in the gym.

It does not suit someone peaking for a strength test. There is no taper here and nothing that builds towards a date. Use a cycle designed for that, such as the Russian Squat Program.

At three days a week it is a fairly low frequency for each pattern. If size is the goal and you can only train three times, an upper and lower arrangement covering each pattern more often is worth considering instead.

How to run it well

Lead each session with the hardest thing. The compound movements go first, while you are fresh. Isolation work goes last. Reversing this is the most common way to spend a lot of effort on very little.

Leave a rep or two in reserve on most sets. Taking every set to failure buys a little extra stimulus and a great deal of extra fatigue, which is a bad trade when the whole point of the split is to accumulate volume across the week.

Track the reps, not just the weight. Double progression only works if you know what you did last time. A session where you got 10, 10, 9 instead of 9, 9, 8 is progress even though the bar did not change.

Do not let the arm work crowd out the presses and pulls. Curls are easy and pleasant and will quietly expand to fill a session if you let them.

Add volume gradually if you are scaling up. Going from three days to six doubles your weekly work. Do it over a few weeks rather than in one jump.

After the block

Run it again. This is a repeatable block rather than a cycle with an end, and the usual next step is another six weeks with a little more volume or a slightly different exercise selection to keep the stimulus fresh.

If progress has flattened across a couple of blocks, that is the signal to change something structural rather than to add more sets: shift the emphasis to strength for a block, change the movements you anchor on, or take an easier week and come back.

And if you have just finished a specialisation block like the Russian Squat Program or Smolov Jr, this is a good place to land: balanced, repeatable, and undemanding on recovery by comparison.

Concepts used in this article are explained in how training programs are built, which also carries the reference list.