Push Pull Legs For Olympic Weightlifitng

Push, Pull, Legs, or PPL is one of the most popular training splits for strength and hypertrophy, and it’s pretty effective, especially compared with the traditional bro-split. But if you’re like me and love doing the olympic lifts, but want to keep hypertrophy as a main goal, then how could you combine these two approaches into the ultimate strength, power, and hypertrophy program? 

After tinkering around with the split for years I’ve finally found a simple split that works incredibly well, and it’s only three days per week! This is the split I use in my 8-Week OlyBuilding program which you can find here!

The Traditional PPL Split

The traditional training split for PPL typically is not centered around a 7-day week but just repeats the order of workouts with a rest day wherever needed. This can allow you to increase the frequency that can train each muscle group if needed by making sure you have multiple days of recovery for each muscle group. 

Push

On day one you’ll perform your Push workout. This typically includes bench press as the primary exercise but can be swapped for any other pressing exercise, followed by training any muscle group that directly assists with pushing such as chest, delts, and triceps. 

Pull

On day two you’ll perform your Pull workout, which is upper body pulling focused. You’ll commonly see bent-over rows, pullups, DB rows, pullovers, and bicep curls as the main exercises on this training session. The best part about this is that none of the fatigued muscle groups you trained in the previous workout will affect the workout today. 

Legs

On day three you’ll perform your Legs workout. This workout typically rotates between focusing on the deadlift and the squat as the primary exercises, followed by accessory exercises such as Bulgarian Split Squats, Leg Extensions, RDL’s, and Hamstring Curls. 

PPL Split For Weightlifting

For the PPL Weightlifting Split, we’ll follow the same principles of frequency and recovery, and you can train this like the split above, or you can simply place the three workouts on a 7-day calendar with one day of rest between each workout, and two days of rest after the last workout of the week. I use a MWF training split for the 8-Week OlyBuilding Program but follow your heart. The only change is that I start my week with Legs, then Push, then Pull. This allows for better recovery towards the end of the week. 

Day One: Snatch & Legs

On day one (Monday), you’ll start the workout with snatches. I recommend following one of my three On-The-Minute Progressions, but you can do traditional doubles or triples, or just work up to a heavy top set for the day. Try not to spend more than about 30 mins here however as the bulk of the workout is still to come. 

Following the snatches, you’ll then move to your primary strength exercise for the day, back squats. If you’re aiming to build muscle, then stick in the 5-15 rep range, but keep the weight challenging for the rep scheme you choose, stick to a rep scheme for 4 weeks, aiming to increase weight each week, then rotate the rep scheme. Pro-tip, you can switch the exercise you do here to leg presses, hack squats, or even smith-machine squats. These will be more stable to maximize hypertrophy, but free weights are still a necessity for improving your olympic lifting ability. I recommend keeping them in the rotation on a somewhat frequent basis, but if you’ve never tried some of these exercises, they can be very fun!

After the primary strength exercise comes the accessory exercises. I don’t believe you need to do very many of them, but if you were I would recommend at least performing leg extensions and hamstring curls as these will help you take each muscle group to failure, but if you have the time, including some RDL’s and Split Squats or lunges beforehand would be a good plan!

Day Two: Jerks and Push

Day two’s olympic lift, normally done on Wednesdays, will be focused on the jerk, either from the rack or from blocks. Just like with the snatches, following one of my OTM Progressions, doing 3-5 sets of doubles or triples, or working up to a heavy top set for the day is all you need here. 

Following the jerks, you’ll move on to your primary strength exercise for the day. This could be any pressing exercise you like; bench press, incline bench press, strict press, push press, or even smith-machine presses! Whatever variation you choose, I recommend sticking with it for at least four weeks, following the same rep scheme as the squats above, and aiming to increase weight each week. If you still do weightlifting competitions, then maybe prioritize more weightlifting-specific exercises like push presses closer to competition, and less specific exercises like smith machine incline bench press further out from competition. 

After the primary strength exercises, you’ll then move to the accessory exercises that are push related like dumbbell bench, dumbbell incline bench, chest flys, delt raises, and tricep extensions. When choosing these exercises, try to not be redundant. If you did bench press as your primary exercise, you probably don’t need to do dumbbell bench presses and chest flys. Instead, I would recommend doing incline dumbbell shoulder press, flys, and tricep extensions to have a more balanced approach. As far as rep schemes go, stick in the 6-12 rep range, and choose a weight that is challenging for your target rep goal, and aim to increase reps, sets, or weight each week. 

Day Three: Cleans and Pull

Day three’s olympic lift, usually done on Friday’s, will be focused on the clean, typically the full clean, but you can do power cleans if you want, I won’t judge… much. Just like with the other two days, you can follow one of my favorite OTM Progressions, 3-5 sets of doubles or triples, or work up to a heavy top set for the day. 

Following the cleans you’ll choose a primary strength exercise that is pulling related. My favorites are usually either a heavy row or weighted pullups. For those who can do pullups, this is an underrated strength exercises and looks pretty coll when you can rep them out. If not, you can definitely hop on an assisted pullup machine and treat it the same way you would any other strength exercise, add volume until you can do more weight, and keep progressing until you can do normal pullups. If that’s not your jam, then a heavy row is also a great primary exercise! Whether you do bent over rows, pendlay rows, or chest supported rows is up to you! Chest supported rows are a little more stable and can allow you to push the weight and maximize hypertrophy, where barbell rows will help build lower back strength whic can carry over to your squats and olympic lifts. Both have their benefits! Just like with the other strength exercises, perform these in the 5-15 rep range with a challenging enough weight for your target reps per set. Stick with the same exercise and rep scheme for at least four weeks, aiming to increase weight each week, then switch things up. 

After your primary strength exercise, it’s time for the accessory work. Choose 2-4 pulling-related exercises such as single arm dumbbell rows, pullovers, bicep curls, lat pulldowns, cable rows, etc and try not to be redundant, i.e. don’t do bent-over rows, dumbbell rows, and cable rows all in the same workout. Instead try doing bent-over rows, lat pulldowns, pullovers, and bicep curls for a more even balance for the day. 

Why This Works

One of the most important things when it comes to planning your workout programs is figuring out how each training session affects the next one. As I became more experienced as a lifter, I found common patterns.

If I trained back or biceps hard, the front rack position would be nearly impossible to get right, so placing this session needed to be after jerks and cleans, but if I had 2 days of recovery, I felt fine to do snatches. 

I knew that if I trained my shoulders and arms before snatches or jerks, I would have a terrible lockout and my overhead stability would feel like trash, so placing this session needed to be after snatches and jerks, but it wouldn’t affect my cleans at all, so I could do cleans the following session. 

I also knew that if I trained my legs, I would be pretty destroyed, and snatches and cleans would not go well, but jerks would be fine (I actually learned how to get under jerks faster because of the fatigue I had in my legs). The soreness and fatigue usually lasted 2-3 days, but after that, I would normally be fine to do cleans or snatches, hence the layout of the split!

Once you understand some of the common sense principles, you can adapt any training program to fit your goals, but if you just want to follow a program that has already worked for others, then feel free to check out my 8-Week OlyBuilding program here! 

Sample Week

Check out a sample week of this split below, try it out, or grab a copy of my 8-Week OlyBuilding Program here!