The pull, push, legs, auxiliary split, explained

Compound runs a four-day split: pull, push, legs, then auxiliary, always in that order. Pull comes first specifically so a full push session separates the heaviest pull-day lift from the heaviest legs-day lifts, and the fourth day is not a second push or pull day. It is built from neck, rotator cuff, grip and anti-rotation core work, which almost every other program drops entirely.

What are the four days in Compound's split?

Pull, push, legs and auxiliary, covering 31 lifts across the week with no exercise repeated on two different days.

Pull opens with the deadlift and pull-ups, then a row, face pulls and three curl variations before finishing on a dead hang. Push runs bench press into overhead press, incline dumbbell press and weighted dips, then lateral raises and triceps work. Legs runs the back squat into the Romanian deadlift, a Bulgarian split squat, leg press, hip thrust, an adductor exercise, a calf exercise and tibialis raises. Auxiliary opens with the farmer's carry and hanging leg raise, then an RKC plank, Pallof press, back extension, band external rotations and isometric neck holds, closing on the suitcase carry. Every session also opens with a warm-up and closes with about ten minutes of mobility matched to that day's lifts; both get their own articles, at /blog/warm-up-that-works/ and /blog/mobility-after-lifting/.

Why does pull come before push?

Because putting pull first is what keeps the heaviest pull-day lift and the heaviest legs-day lifts from sitting next to each other in the rotation. The deadlift lives on pull day, and the squat and Romanian deadlift live on legs day, three lifts that draw heavily on the same lower back and the same central nervous system. In a pull, push, legs, auxiliary rotation, an entire push session sits between pull and legs on one side of the cycle, and an entire auxiliary session sits between them on the other. Neither heavy posterior-chain day is ever adjacent to the other.

Run the days in a different order and that spacing disappears. Push, pull, legs, auxiliary looks just as reasonable on paper, but it puts pull directly next to legs, which means the deadlift and the squat and RDL land back to back with nothing between them. The two most demanding lower-back days in the week need a buffer, and putting pull first is what creates one.

Why is there a fourth day, and why isn't it just more push or pull?

Because a three-day push, pull, legs split has no natural place for the neck, the rotator cuff, grip and anti-rotation core work, and those get left out entirely rather than added on. Auxiliary is where that work gets scheduled, with its own warm-up and its own 8 lifts, not five extra minutes tacked onto the end of a session that already ran long.

Band external rotations train the muscles that externally rotate the shoulder, a pattern that almost no bench-and-row program trains directly. A 2021 systematic review of overhead athletes found that external and internal rotation strength were protective factors against rotator cuff tendinopathy, and that an imbalance between the two, one direction of rotation much stronger than the other, raised shoulder injury risk in a way that pressing and pulling volume alone does not fix.

Isometric neck holds get their own slot because almost no accessory routine trains the neck at all. A 2025 systematic review of cervical spine strengthening programs found that strengthening the neck reduced sports-related concussion incidence in male rugby players by 45 percent, a risk ratio of 0.55, though the same effect has not yet been shown in female rugby players or in soccer. Compound is not a collision-sport program, but the four 20-second holds, front, back, and both sides, build a kind of strength most lifters never touch on purpose.

Farmer's and suitcase carries train grip directly, on the logic that pull day already asks the hands to hold on but never trains the hold as its own variable. Grip strength is also one of the more consistently replicated markers of general health: in a study of 139,691 adults across 17 countries, every 5 kg drop in grip strength was associated with a 16 percent higher risk of all-cause mortality, and grip strength predicted death better than systolic blood pressure did. That does not mean carrying two dumbbells down a hallway adds years to a life. It means grip strength is a proxy for overall muscular capacity worth training on purpose, not as a side effect of everything else.

The neglected work is not all filed under auxiliary, either. Tibialis raises, training the muscle on the front of the shin that lifts the foot rather than pushes it down, live on legs day. Face pulls, dead hangs and reverse curls, covering rear delts, grip endurance and the forearms, live on pull day. Auxiliary carries the rest: core, lower back, neck, rotator cuff and carries. None of it is one day's problem to solve and then ignore for the other three.

How often does each muscle actually get trained?

Roughly once every four sessions per specific lift, below the twice a week the hypertrophy literature favors. Compound moves to the next day in the sequence, pull to push to legs to auxiliary to pull again, based on sessions completed, not on the day of the week. Train four times in a single week and the math lines up: four sessions close one full cycle, so each day, and each lift on it, comes back around every seven days. Train three times a week instead, and the cycle still needs four sessions to close, but only three of them land inside any seven-day week, so a cycle that used to take a week now takes closer to nine or ten days, and the day that used to fall on a Monday drifts to a Wednesday, then a Friday, then back around later than a week later.

Either way, the frequency per lift holds at once every four sessions. That is below the roughly twice-a-week-per-muscle frequency that a 2016 meta-analysis of ten controlled trials found produced a larger hypertrophy effect than training a muscle group once a week at matched weekly volume. Compound does not hit that target for any single heavy compound, and that is a deliberate trade, not an oversight. The deadlift, the bench press and the back squat are loaded and rested hardest in the whole plan precisely because they ask a lot of the whole body, and asking for a second heavy session of the same lift inside four training days would cut into the recovery the other heavy lifts also need. Smaller muscles get more real frequency than any single lift implies: rear delts show up through rows and face pulls on pull day and lateral raises on push day, and the lower back is loaded by the deadlift and the RDL, then finished with back extension on auxiliary. It is the single heavy compound, not the muscle behind it, that only comes around once a cycle.

How is each day ordered, exercise by exercise?

Heaviest compound first, single-joint and bodyweight work last, on every one of the four days. Pull opens on the deadlift, push opens on the bench press, legs opens on the back squat, and each of those gets the most sets, the heaviest relative load and the longest rest of anything on that day. What follows moves down in demand: multi-joint machine and dumbbell work in the middle of the session, then curls, raises, extensions and holds at the end, when technique matters less and fatigue costs less.

Leg press is where that ordering is easiest to see. It sits after the Bulgarian split squat, not before it. A pre-fatigued split squat gets wobbly, since it depends on single-leg balance under load, and the leg press is the safest place in the day to be tired: seated, back supported, feet fixed. It is also the only way to load the quads again without asking anything more of a low back that already handled the squat and the RDL earlier in the same session. Reversing that order would save nothing and cost stability on the one lift in the day that most needs it.

The weight itself is a separate question. How much goes on the bar each session is decided by double progression, not by the day's ordering; see /blog/double-progression/ for how that rule works.

Why doesn't the exercise list ever change?

Because a fixed list is what makes 31 lifts trackable at all. Every exercise and every slot keeps the same identity for as long as the app is used, which is what lets progression, history and slot choices mean anything session over session. Swapping exercises in and out on a whim would turn every one of those records into a guess about what actually happened last time. The tradeoff, and the full argument for keeping the list fixed, is its own article: see /blog/what-compound-decides/.

What does Compound do about this?

Compound runs the rotation for you. It picks the next day off the sequence rather than the calendar, so a missed session does not throw the split off, it just waits for the next time a lift is opened. Every day loads in the fixed order described above, heaviest compound first, and every session ends with the mobility block matched to what that day just trained. None of it is adjustable, on purpose: the split is the one thing in the app that is not a setting.