Push pull legs (PPL) routines

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PPL groups by movement pattern: one push day (chest, shoulders, triceps), one pull day (back, biceps) and one leg day. The advantage is that muscles already working together in a movement get trained together, so you do not hammer the triceps one day and ask them to work again the next. The engine assigns it on three days once you are intermediate or advanced, and on five days it doubles it to bring push and pull frequency up to twice a week.

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Push pull legs once or twice a week: what a trial in trained men showed

A three-day push pull legs routine trains each muscle group only once a week; the six-day version, twice. The difference looks like scheduling, but it touches a question that has been measured: whether, with volume equated, it matters to train a muscle once or several times.

Schoenfeld, Ratamess, Peterson, Contreras and Tiryaki-Sonmez published a trial in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research in 2015 with twenty trained young men, matched by baseline strength. One group followed a split routine working two or three groups per session, each once a week; the other a total-body routine three times a week, with one exercise per group.

Split routine (each group once a week) versus total body (three times a week) in the trial by Schoenfeld et al. (2015) with twenty trained men.
Measure	Split, once a week	Total body, three times a week
Forearm flexor thickness	Smaller increase	Significantly greater increase
Bench press and squat strength	No differences	No differences

The more frequent routine produced a significantly greater increase in forearm flexor muscle thickness, and for bench press and squat maximal strength there were no differences. The authors read this as a sign that training each group more often may favour hypertrophy.

Applied to push pull legs: if you can train six days, running the cycle twice a week is the option consistent with this data; if you only have three, a full-body routine gives you more frequency in the same time. The limit, plainly: twenty people, and the difference in thickness showed up in one specific muscle group, not in all of them.

References

Schoenfeld BJ, Ratamess NA, Peterson MD, Contreras B, Tiryaki-Sonmez G. Influence of resistance training frequency on muscular adaptations in well-trained men. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 2015;29(7):1821-1829.

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Push Pull Legs: the most efficient hypertrophy split

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