Upper Body Push Day Workout Routine (Exercises, Sets & Reps)

Today, I want to walk you through a simple push day workout routine designed for muscle growth. It’s ideal for anyone who’s moved past the beginner stages of training and wants to beef up their chest, shoulders and triceps.

What Is A Push Day?

A push day workout routine forms part of a split routine known as push pull legs, often abbreviated to PPL.

Unlike full body workout routines, which work all the major muscle groups in a single workout, a push pull legs split focuses on different muscle groups on different days.

Specifically, a push pull legs split involves three separate training sessions:

• Upper body push day
• Upper body pull day
• Lower body day

Although you can use different training frequencies, depending on your goals and training status (beginner, intermediate or advanced), the push pull legs split is better suited for intermediate and advanced lifters who want to train 4-6 days a week.

What Muscle Groups Do You Work on Push Day?

The push day workout focuses on pushing movements for the upper body, which involve the chest, shoulders and triceps.

A typical push day will feature compound exercises like the dumbbell bench press (both flat and incline), barbell bench press (flat and incline bench press), barbell overhead press, dumbbell shoulder press, flyes, and dips, along with some isolation exercises for the triceps.

A pull day workout, on the other hand, involves pulling movements for the upper body, which hit the back and biceps.

Exercises on the menu include compound movements like rows (barbell, dumbbell and cable), pull-ups/chin-ups, lat pulldowns, as well as dumbbell/barbell curls for your biceps.

With the lower body workout, you train the quads, glutes, hamstrings and calves, using exercises like squats, deadlifts, leg extensions, leg curls and calf raises.

NOTE: Technically, there’s no such thing as pushing muscles, as most muscles generate movement by pulling on bones, rather than pushing them back to their original position. 

However, while there’s no such thing as pushing muscles, the chest, shoulders and triceps are typically involved in pushing-type movements, which is why they’re trained together on push day.

Push Day Workout Routine

• Bench Press 4 sets x 5-8 reps
• Incline Dumbbell Press 3 sets x 8-12 reps
• Dumbbell Flyes 2 sets x 12-15 reps
• Dumbbell Lateral Raise 4 sets x 10-15 reps
• Triceps Pressdown 3 sets x 10-15 reps
• Overhead Triceps Extension 2 sets x 10-15

Push Day Exercises

Bench Press

Sets 4 Reps 5-8

Exercise number one is the bench press, which is a highly effective way to build size in your chest, shoulders and triceps. You’ll be using a relatively heavy weight that allows 5-8 reps per set. Because this is your first exercise, and you’re using a heavy weight, make sure to do several progressively heavier warm-up sets before your first work set.

Incline Dumbbell Press

Sets 3 Reps 8-12

Next up is the incline dumbbell press, using a bench angle of around 30 degrees. Like the bench press, this exercise also targets the chest, shoulders and triceps, but shifts the emphasis to the upper part of the chest.

Dumbbell Flyes

Sets 2 Reps 12-15

To finish off the chest, you’ll be doing a couple of sets of dumbbell flyes. Use a relatively light weight, and make sure to keep your reps slow and controlled.

You don’t need to bring the dumbbells together at the top, as that’s when the tension tends to come off the chest. But you do want to bring the dumbbells down far enough so that you feel a stretch in the pecs.

If you find dumbbell flyes hard on your shoulders, high-to-low cable crossovers on a cable machine are a suitable alternative.

Dumbbell Lateral Raise

Sets 4 Reps 10-15

Next, you’ll move to the lateral raise, which targets the side delts, helping to widen your shoulders. The anterior delts have already been worked hard with the chest exercises, and the rear delts are going to be trained in the pull workouts to come, and the lateral raise ensures that the side delts don’t miss out.

Triceps Pressdown

Sets 3 Reps 10-15

Next, it’s time for some isolation work for your triceps. Although your triceps have been worked with both the bench press and incline dumbbell press, a few extra sets of direct triceps will give them a nice boost in growth.

Overhead Triceps Extension

Sets 2 Reps 10-15

Finally it’s the overhead triceps extension, which challenges the triceps at longer lengths. Putting your muscles under a high level of tension when they’re in a stretched position, which is what you get with the overhead triceps extension, plays an important role in stimulating growth.

Push Day Workout: How to Warm Up

The number of sets listed are the actual work sets only, and don’t include warm-up sets.

It’s always a good idea, especially if you’re using heavy weights, to do several progressively heavier warm-up sets. This will prepare the joints, the muscles and the nervous system that controls those muscles for the heavy work to come.

In most cases, somewhere between 1-3 warm-up sets will do the job.

However, the exact number of warm-up sets you do will vary depending on a number of factors, including the temperature of the gym you’re training in, how your joints feel, the amount of weight you’re lifting, and where that exercise is placed in the workout.

There have been times when I’ve been training in a cold gym, it’s early in the morning and my joints are feeling a bit stiff, where I’ve ended up doing 7-8 warm-up sets before getting into the heavy stuff.

On the flip side, with some of the exercises that come later in the workout, the muscles being worked are already warm, so you won’t need many, if any, warm-up sets.

What about stretching?

In most cases, there’s very little benefit in stretching, be it dynamic or static, as part of a warm-up.

While the adverse effects of stretching on strength and power have been exaggerated, most studies show that pre-exercise stretching does little for injury prevention and has no beneficial effects on lifting performance.

Can you stretch as part of your warm up? Yes. Do you have to? No. It’s certainly not mandatory, and many people will do just as well without it.

You can read more about how to warm up for weight training here.

How to Progress a Push Day Workout

You’ll notice that the workout use rep ranges, such as 5-8 or 8-12, rather than a fixed number of reps in each set.

For example, in the first push day workout, the prescription for the bench press is 4 sets of 5-8 reps.

The idea is that you select a weight that allows you to perform at least 5 reps in each set, but no more than 8.

Every time you go to the gym, you try to do more reps than you did the workout before. Once you’re able to do 8 reps in every set, increase the weight for the following workout.

It’s a form of progression known as the double progression method. Here’s an example of how it might look in practice:

Workout 1

• Set 1: 100 pounds x 8
• Set 2: 100 pounds x 7
• Set 3: 100 pounds x 6
• Set 4: 100 pounds x 5

Workout 2

• Set 1: 100 pounds x 8
• Set 2: 100 pounds x 7
• Set 3: 100 pounds x 6
• Set 4: 100 pounds x 6

Workout 3

• Set 1: 100 pounds x 8
• Set 2: 100 pounds x 8
• Set 3: 100 pounds x 7
• Set 4: 100 pounds x 7

Workout 4

• Set 1: 100 pounds x 8
• Set 2: 100 pounds x 8
• Set 3: 100 pounds x 8
• Set 4: 100 pounds x 8

Workout 5

• Set 1: 105 pounds x 8
• Set 2: 105 pounds x 7
• Set 3: 105 pounds x 6
• Set 4: 105 pounds x 5

As you can see, in workout four, once you’re able to do 8 reps in all 4 sets, you add weight in workout five and repeat the cycle. 

This simple double progression method can work well for most exercises, and will produce decent gains in muscle mass over several months, just as long as you stay consistent and work hard.

It’s also important to make sure that your technique remains solid from one workout to the next. Don’t kid yourself into thinking that you’ve gotten stronger, when all you’re doing is cheating on those last few reps to get the weight up.

The exact number of workouts it takes to reach this point will vary from person to person, and from exercise to exercise. It might take 10 workouts or it might take 5. But wait until you can do 4 sets of 8 reps before adding weight.

FAQ

How many exercises should you do on push day?

As a rule of thumb, I’d suggest doing 1-3 exercises per muscle group, and 2-5 sets per exercise. 

If you’re training with a high intensity of effort, and pushing yourself hard in each set (which you’ll need to if you want to build muscle), you’re not going to need more than 2 or 3 exercises for a muscle group in any given workout.

As a bare minimum, I’d suggest doing 3 exercises on push day – one exercise for your chest, one for your shoulders and one for your triceps.

Is it better to do all my chest exercises first, followed by my shoulders and triceps, or can I do the exercises in any order?

In terms of sequencing, you want to do your chest exercises first, followed by the shoulders, then the triceps.

Starting a workout by training triceps will fatigue them to the extent that they become the limiting factor when you’re training chest and shoulders.

That is, because your triceps are already fatigued, they’ll limit the amount of work you’re able to do for your chest and shoulders, which can have an adverse effect on muscle growth.

On a push pull legs split, do you need to rest between push day and pull day workouts?

There’s no need to rest between the push and pull workouts. Because you’re training different muscle groups on different days, you can train on consecutive days without the need for a day off.

Can I incorporate leg workouts in any of my push/pull days?

Legs can be split into push and pull movements, which turns a push/pull/legs split into a push/pull split.

A push/pull workout plan is ideal for people who don’t like leg days. Rather than devote an entire day to training legs, you incorporate leg workouts in your push/pull days.

On push day you do some quadriceps-dominant lower body exercises, such as the squat and leg press, while pull day workouts include some work for your hamstrings, like the leg curl and Romanian deadlift.