You can spend a lot of time searching for the perfect workout split to suit your goals, when the reality is, there really isn’t one. That’s not to say however, that there isn’t one workout split that will suit the majority of lifters. The split I’m talking about is of course, push, pull legs.
Before I go into why exactly I feel like push pull legs is a great workout for the majority of lifters, I should explain that if you are a beginner, stick to your full body workouts for now until you have maxed out your potential on them. Push pull legs is a great intermediate to advanced workout split due to its frequency and volume, but as a beginner your body only needs mild stimulus to grow like a weed ( I miss those days ) so full body workouts are perfect. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be training hard though.
Push pull legs is then, as you may have imagined, split down into exercising the muscles that perform pushing and pulling movements, with legs thrown in also. There are numerous ways to run this split throughout the week, the most popular ones being push, pull, legs, rest repeat and push, pull, legs, rest, push and pull. The only real difference there being if you have the nerve (and recovery capabilities) to train legs twice a week.
For push day you are looking at training your chest, shoulders and triceps. Quadriceps are a group of muscles that produce a pushing movement, but these are left for leg day. Pull days will be training your back and biceps, leaving hamstrings and quads for leg day.
But what makes this split so great for the majority of lifters I hear you ask?
You can focus on certain muscle groups
As long as frequency and volume is kept in check, then push pull legs allows you to focus on weaker muscle groups that you want to bring up, more often. It’s quite easy to manipulate frequency in volume, if you were looking at wanting to bring up your chest more than your shoulders then all you would have to do is limit the amount of shoulder exercises you do in your push workout and predominantly focus on exercises that target the chest. You could be doing 4 chest exercises and 2 shoulder ones. You can even focus more attention on one specific part of a muscle if you like, for example targeting the medial delts more rather than the front that get a lot of hammering from all pressing movements.
You can use a larger variety of exercises
As you will most likely be training each muscle group twice per week, this gives you the opportunity to utilize more exercises in your split. New exercises provide a new stimulus for the muscles and can lead to new tissue being formed. In your first push session of the week, your chest sessions could be primarily focused on fly movements. Your second push session of the week could be more pressing movements. If you don’t already, start adding in a lot of cable work to your training sessions. Cables provide a constant tension on the muscle being trained, something that is harder to execute with free weights.
Your training goals are easier to prioritize
One of your goals might be that you want to increase your chest strength, but also get leaner at the same time (yes this can be done). As you are training push twice a week, one of your chest sessions would be heavy weight focused with reps between 6-12 and lower set volume. The other would have more of a metabolic stress design to it with more exercises, slightly higher sets per exercise and also reps ranging from 10-20.
Push pull legs then, is a great intermediate to advanced workout that can be used by the majority of lifters to take your physique and training to the next level.
