Reddit PPL Spreadsheet (Metallicadpa 6 Day PPL Program)

When you start working out at a gym, you most probably don’t have a defined workout plan or even a specific goal in some cases. You hit the gym to stay fit, lose weight or to build strength and muscles.

While there is nothing wrong in having any type of fitness goal but expecting to get a significant outcome from exercising without a proper plan is unwise.

Whatever your goal may be, you need to train, strength progression, muscles growth and fat loss are the by-products of that training. Isn’t it obvious that you will grow your biceps faster with 40-pound dumbbell curls than doing 10-pound dumbbell curls?

Metallicadpa PPL program is compiled with a goal to provide a comprehensive guide to beginners for strength progression and in turn muscle growth through a detailed 6 day PPL routine.

Program Overview

The Reddit user u/Metallicadpa compiled this workout program borrowing by ideas and insight from many effective workout programs. And thus, it is called Metallicadpa PPL program or Reddit PPL program.

It is basically designed around single action sessions of 3 types of workouts, all of which is performed twice a week. The PPL stands for the 3 types of workouts to be performed, push, pull and legs.

You have six working days in a week and one rest day. Roughly, on day one you will be performing push type main lifts and accessory work, on the second day you will be doing pull type exercises and accessories and the third day is reserved for legs. Your finish this three-day cycle twice every week. The workout and rest day order can be altered as per convenience.

This is a high frequency, high volume, linear progression program designed for the beginners. Many derived versions of this original Reddit PPL routine have been created to suit intermediate and advanced level lifters.

Reddit PPL Aka Metallicadpa PPL Program

The several aspects of the Metallicadpa PPL program are explained below. Everything from the type of lifts to deloading is described here.

You can spread out the workouts through the week in PPLRPPL or PPLPPLR sequence, where R stands for a rest day. The PPL workout routine can be performed in either push, pull, legs or pull, push, legs order.

Type of lifts (PPL)

The Reddit PPL program divides the workout sessions based on the type of lifts. On one working day, you have to perform only one type of lifts throughout the session that would either be push-type, pull-type or legs specific.

In push-type lifts, the main exercises are the bench press and overhead press. You would be performing push-type lifts two days a week. On one of those days, you’ll perform bench press as main lift and overhead press as accessory work and on the other day, you will perform overhead press as main lift and bench press as accessory work.

The main lifts for pull-type exercises are deadlifts and barbell rows. Similar to push type lifts you’ll perform either one of these lifts as main and accessory alternatively.

Squats are the main lifts to perform on legs days. On every work day, your main lift will be followed by some accessory work with the same type of lifts.

• The main lifts for pull days are deadlift and barbell rows, for push days bench press and overhead press and on legs day, squats. The accessory lifts include cable rows inclined dumbbell press, leg curls etc.

Progressions

The original Reddit PPL program follows a linear progression method. As this 6 day PPL designed for beginners, who can make progress quickly, it recommends you to add weight on every workout.

To choose the weight for your first workout, you start with empty bar perform 5 reps then keep adding weights gradually until you have to slow down to finish the set. A weight of 2.5 to 5 pounds lesser than this weight can be chosen as starting point. Follow the process for each exercise.
On each workout, you progress by 2.5 to 5 pounds to squats, bench, overhead press and rows and 5 to 10 pounds to deadlifts. You keep progressing till you reach failure.

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Accessories and accessories progression

Accessory work for pull-type lifts are pull-downs, seated cable rows, face pulls, hammer curls and dumbbell curls. For push-type lifts, one among the overhead press and bench press would be accessory work while the other is the main lift, accompanied by inclined dumbbell press, tricep pushdowns and overhead tricep extensions.

Romanian deadlifts, leg press, leg curls and calf raises shall be performed as accessory work on legs day.

All the accessory exercises are to be performed in sets of 8-12. You start with a weight with which you can comfortably perform 8 reps of all accessories for designated sets on a given day. And then you progress towards achieving easy completion of all the sets with 12 reps in the same weight. Once you have done that, add weight. The amount of added weight should be such that you could perform at least 8 rep sets.

Substitutions

Other than the main lifts all the other exercises can be substituted with the ones you can do with your available equipment. Like cable rows can be substituted with similar movements like dumbbell rows or t-bar rows.

Following are substitution ideas.

Sets and Reps

For the main lifts, do all sets with 5 reps except the last set. Last is as many reps as possible (AMRAP).
For squats, you do 2 sets of five rep and third AMRAP set. For the bench press, overhead press and barbell rows you perform 4 sets of five reps each and fifth set will be the AMRAP one. You perform only one set of deadlifts and that will be the AMRAP.

All the accessory work is done in 3 sets of 8 to 12 reps.

Rest

For any kind of exercise program, it is best to rest for as long as needed. But the general guideline you should follow while in Reddit PPL program is to take 3 to five minutes rest during main lifts and anywhere between 1 to 3 minutes when doing the accessory work.

AMRAP

For all main lifts, the last set to be performed is “as many reps as possible” or AMRAP set. It is supposed to be more than five reps and as many as you can perform without compromising on the form. These sets are the chance to test your limits. AMRAP will also increase your training volume.

Warmups

Warming up is making your muscles ready for the heavy lifts. To get the blood flowing into the muscles and joints to avoid injury due to sudden loading.

There are many ways to warm up, dynamic stretches, a little jog, or anything that suits you.

• The best way warm-up for a particular exercise is practising the same move. So, to warm up squats, do squats with lower weights as warm-up.

Failure

If you fail to perform certain main lift on a day, that can be due to many reasons like insufficient sleep or it can be strength failure.

• It can be called a strength failure if you fail to perform your designated sets at a certain weight for three straight sessions. If you reach strength failure, it is time to deload and start from there.

Deloading

When you reach strength failure it doesn’t mean that you reached your absolute limit. You just need to deload a bit and restart from there. Just take off around 10% from the weight you faced failure from. And start your way back up from there.

Original Reddit PPL Spreadsheet [Metallicadpa PPL Spreadsheet]

To make the things a little easier for you, a Reddit user u/Mobius000 has created an excel sheet to help you track your progress. Open this PPL program spreadsheet, download it, put your set weight for each main lift and accessories for the first week and the progressed weights for week2.

The Reddit PPL spreadsheet containing the complete schedule of Reddit PPL program including weight selection and progression is your complete step by step guide for overall improvement.

The template has a complete schedule and number of sets listed. You can record the number of sets you could finish in the AMRAP set. You can take a printout of the excel sheet to use it to record and tick out the sets you finished.

Here is another compact version of Reddit PPL spreadsheet created by u/FattestRabbit with weeks side-by-side instead of vertical.

Modified Metallicadpa PPL Spreadsheet

Another Reddit user u/forray has created an advanced version of the reddit PPL program spreadsheet for Meallicadpa PPL. Unlike the one above this modified excel sheet doesn’t just list the workout sets and reps in a list, but also lets you track your week by week progress. The creator has also included graphs for the main lifts to get a better perspective of the progress.

With this Reddit PPL program spreadsheet, you can track how much weight you lifted and how much reps you managed to complete in AMRAP sets. In this way, you can see your progress in terms of both weight and reps.

Metallicadpa PPL PDF

Click on the button to download PDF file of this 6 day PPL workout program

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The Reddit PPL program is a comprehensive strength gaining program for beginners. With a little modification, it can be used by intermediate lifters too.

The original Metallicadpa PPL spreadsheet and the modified one, both are really helpful to carefully follow the program and track the progress for efficient training.