Six-Day Standard: Linear Push/Pull/Legs

A six-day push/pull/legs rotation run as a per-lift linear progression. Each session carries exactly one lift that climbs — bench, overhead press, row, weighted pull-up, back squat and front squat, with a single heavy deadlift set riding the squat day — plus one secondary held at fixed reps and a few accessories that never chase load. The final set of each primary is taken to as many reps as possible: clear the stated rep count and the load goes up, miss it and the load repeats, miss twice and that lift alone resets ten percent.

For the intermediate who has already decided they are training six days a week and wants a structured per-lift progression rather than a volume dump. Not a beginner program — you need a recent five-rep best on each primary — and not a recomposition program; run it at maintenance calories or above. Commercial gym: barbell, rack and bench are hard, while every cable and machine accessory ships with a named substitution. Choosing between this and Push Pull Legs — High Volume is a choice between load progression and volume accumulation.

Progression follows our Progressive Overload framework's per-lift linear model — each lift advances on its own schedule, so one stalled press never resets a climbing squat. Per-session set counts sit at the low end of the Volume Management framework's MAV band because every muscle gets two weekly exposures, so the weekly total adds up without long sessions. At equal weekly sets, research finds frequency itself adds little growth (Schoenfeld et al., 2019). The unconditional light week and the mid-block deload both come from our Fatigue & Recovery framework.

Expect three weeks where everything climbs every session, a light week, four weeks where the rep gate starts deciding, a deload at week nine, two weeks of half-sized increments, and a rep-max re-test in week twelve.