by Thomas Incledon, PhD(c), RD, LD/LN, RPT, NSCA-CPT, CSCS
Introduction
I remember walking into gym class, as a young boy, and seeing a guy move up and down between two parallel bars. As I walked closer, it was obvious this guy was huge (at least compared to me!) He lifted himself up and down easily. After about 30 reps, he got off, looked at me and said “Hi, Tommy.” I could not believe my eyes. This huge muscular marvel, was once a skinny geek. Obviously, I wanted to know his secrets—how did he get big? He told me: Dips. He started doing them to get in shape for wrestling and just stuck with it. If you want to try a good upper body exercise, then give dips a shot. I cannot promise you will get as big as my friend did, but if you don’t try them, then how will you know?
Dip Basics 101
Dips are an excellent exercise for developing the upper body. Some people do them as a chest exercise, while others do them as a triceps exercise. The basic movement involves assuming a neutral grip (palms facing each other). Start with a straight arm supported position. Take a deep breath in, bend your elbows and lower yourself until you feel a mild stretch in your shoulder joint. The depth of your dip will depend upon your flexibility and strength levels. At the bottom position, start to push up by extending your arms and breath out. That’s the basic movement and there are many variations. Let’s cover some of these variations and see how the stress can be focused on different muscles.
Chest Emphasis
The major chest muscle is called the pectoralis major. This muscle originates on the clavicle (collarbone) and sternum. (1) It attaches to the humerus (upper arm bone) and functions to adduct the humerus anteriorly, or bring the upper arm bones towards each other across the front of your torso. (1) To involve the pectoralis major more, the elbows must flare slightly out to the sides during the descent of the dip. By bending the knees and leaning forward, you can further emphasize chest involvement in this exercise.
Another option is to use a wider grip, like the wide end of the “V” dip bars (or angled bars). This causes the elbow to flare out and places more stress on the chest muscles. There are some dangers though. A very wide grip or excessively flared elbows can increase stress in the shoulder joint, which can stretch and even tear the joint capsule. (2) The wider grip also shifts emphasis from the triceps, upper pecs, and anterior deltoids to the lattisimus dorsi (“lats”), teres major (deep muscle at the bottom of your shoulder blade), and lower pectoralis major. (3) So your best bet is to use a grip slightly wider than shoulder width and keep the elbow flare to 45 degrees or less from your sides.
Triceps Emphasis
Dips are a better exercise for the triceps than for the chest. For that reason, I recommend you perform the movement in a fashion to emphasize the triceps. The triceps is a three-headed muscle that crosses both the elbow joint and the shoulder joint. (1) All three heads (long, lateral, and medial) are involved in extension of the elbow joint. (2,3) By descending in the dip with arms close to your sides and elbows moving back, you can place more stress on the triceps. If you keep your legs straight and head up—thereby minimizing the forward lean—you can place even more emphasis on your triceps. A shoulder width grip is best for triceps development. Grip wider than that and you start to get more chest involvement.
Other Muscles Worked
Performing dips requires more than just the pectoralis major and triceps brachii. The anterior deltoid (front of the shoulder), pectoralis minor (smaller chest muscle under the pectoralis major), serratus anterior (serrated muscles along your sides below the chest), latissimus dorsi (back muscles), and teres major are also involved. (2) These muscles however work more to stabilize the body and assist the pectoralis major and triceps brachii. (3) For this reason, you should do other exercises to train these muscles, as dips alone will not optimally stress them.
Variation
Let’s say you want to try doing dips but you’re not strong enough. There are still several possibilities. The first is to use a counter resistance machine. With these, you kneel or stand on a weighted platform. The weight selected on the machine pushes against you to reduce your body weight, thus making the movement easier. Another important point is that by being in contact with the platform, it is easier to balance yourself. This is especially important for the beginner, as it makes the movement easier to perform. As you progress, just decrease the amount of counter resistance until eventually you can do dips on your own.
What if you train at home or do not have access to a counter-resistance machine? You can have a training partner assist you by lifting up on your legs. This can be awkward though, especially as the person doing the dips approaches failure. As he/she struggles to finish the last rep, the spotter can get kicked. Another option is to set up a platform or bench where you can stand up to the supported position, then lower yourself to the bottom position and repeat. These are called negatives and can cause quite a bit of muscle soreness, so do not overdo it. If you have a power rack, you can also fix two bars going across and dip between them. Make sure they are not set too wide where it becomes too difficult to dip between them and get a good range of motion. Just don’t do what my knuckle-head friend did and use broom sticks. Eventually they will crack and break. It is not a comfortable feeling to crash into the floor— knees first.
For you home gym types, you can set up two chairs with the backs facing one another and dip between them. Make sure the chairs are stable and/or weighted down so that they can’t fall over. There are also dip machines where you are strapped into a chair, and then you push down against two handles. Usually there is a selectorized weight stack. If you have done these before, then you already know that you can lift a lot more on machine dips than regular bar dips. Why is that? The balance factor. With bar dips, you have to stop your body from wobbling all over the place. With machine dips, you just have to push down on the weight—your body is already stable.
Adding Dips To Your Workout
So now you know how to do them and how to target the chest or the triceps. So when do you do dips? If you are pressed for time and need to limit your exercises, make sure you keep the dips. If you are new to weight training, I would recommend performing dips early in the workout when you are fresh. A fair amount of strength and coordination are required to perform this exercise. If you wait until too late in the workout, you will not be able to do them properly, and you can get injured. For those of you that have been training for less than a year, I would recommend doing dips at the end of a chest workout or beginning of a triceps workout. Remember dips are a better triceps exercise then a chest exercise. If you do them first during a chest workout, your triceps will get blasted and you won’t be able to overload your chest effectively with other exercises (i.e. bench or incline press). Now, if Arnold’s chest is small compared to yours, then when you do them does not matter all that much. Consider doing them relative to their priority in achieving your goals. As a competitive powerlifter and weightlifter, I do them towards the end of my workout. Why? Simply because the competitive lifts are a priority, and dips are an assistant or auxiliary exercise. I use them to strengthen my triceps and keep my shoulder joint flexible.
Gymnasts should do them prior to other exercises like the bench press. This is because their sport requires them to move their body, not barbells. For these athletes then, the bench press would be the assistance or auxiliary movement, not dips. So the general rule of thumb is know what your goals are (or what you want to achieve), and then use dips at the appropriate time in your workout routine.
The number of repetitions and sets also depends on your goals. For most people, repetitions in the range of 5-15 will suffice. When training for size keep the reps between 8-15 and use shorter rest intervals between sets. When you can do 15 reps add some weight. Alternatively, I see a lot of strength athletes doing 3-5 sets of 6-8 repetitions with good results. Some simple guidelines are to look at what other exercises you are doing and then plan accordingly. If I am planning on doing 5 sets of 5 reps in bench press, then I will only do 3 sets of 8 reps for dips. As an assistant exercise, I tend to do about 3-4 more reps then in my main lifts. This way, as I cycle my competitive lifts, there is also a cycling effect on the assistant exercises as well. So if today you bench press for several sets of 8 reps then do 2 or 3 sets of dips for 11-12 reps. Next week, if you perform 6 reps per set in the bench, then do 9-10 reps for dips. Of course, you may have to add weight. That brings us to the next question: How much weight to use when doing dips?
How much weight to use is determined by proper form and the number of repetitions one plans to do. As a muscle adapts to a load (the weight you are lifting), it is important to increase the load to continue getting stronger. This does not have to be a big increase though. You can add weight by using a dip/chin belt or holding a dumbbell in some fashion between your legs. Note that form can make a big difference in how much weight you can handle. My buddy was doing dips with 135 pounds for about 4 reps. He would go down about half way, flare the elbows out, lean forward excessively, and not fully extend the elbows. He complained that his shoulders would ache. I had him stop doing upper body work for a week— it was obvious his joints were inflamed and irritated from excessive stress in the shoulder joint. When I started him back up, I limited him to using 45 pounds for dips. He had to do them absolutely strict, with elbows close, nice stretch in the bottom and full extension. He could only do about 8 reps. After three weeks, he noticed his bench was starting to go up, and he had no shoulder pain. Take home point: utilize good form with dips, and increase the weight as form follows. If you are using a weight so heavy that you only do a partial rep, it is a waste of time. Years ago, partial reps in a power rack were really popular. Some people have taken that approach to the extreme and do them for all kinds of movements. Partial reps should not be the focus of a routine, but if used at all, an adjunct to the routine. In my experience, people use partial reps as an excuse to handle more weight. Inevitably, their joints start to ache or they get hurt. This is because they place too much stress on the shoulder joint.
Intense Variations
A better way to use partials is at the end of set. When you can’t do any more full reps then just do some only going half way down. This way you can continue to overload the muscle fibers that have not yet fatigued without exposing you joints to unnecessary stress. Considers these other possibilities: forced reps, drop sets and negatives. With forced reps someone assists you with the last two or three reps. Make sure that you are doing the lifting and not the person helping you. If you are fatiguing fast then don’t keep going. I watch guys all the time shouting “One more!” when its obvious their buddy is now lifting them and lowering them. Drop sets or descending sets are just a bunch of sets done without rest in between them. Suppose you want to do 15 dips, you can attach a heavy weight to you that only enables 5 reps. Reduce the weigh and do another 5 reps, reduce the weight again and do the final five reps. The advantage of this type of training is that the quality of overload is high from start to finish. It is pretty tough so be cautious when first using it. Another really tough variation is to do heavy negatives. With these, take a weigh that you can normally do 5 reps with and lower yourself slowly for an eight count about 10 times. Negatives can make you very sore. One set initially is enough. I wouldn’t use them more than once every two weeks, as it takes a lot longer to recover from negatives. With this type of training slow is better—too fast and you can crash into the bottom and over stretch the joint. This is probably a good time to cover some safety concerns when doing dips.
Safety Considerations
1. Tempo: perform dips in a controlled fashion. Never free fall into the bottom. This can place unnecessary stress on the elbows and shoulders, leading to injury.
2. Bouncing in the bottom: do not try to get a stretch reflex with this movement, for the same reasons as above.
3. Excessively flaring the elbows: this can cause the humerus to excessively rotate and place additional stress on ligaments within the joint.
4. Going too deep: your shoulders should never descend below your hands, for the same reasons as above.
5. Excessive swinging of the body or head: this usually happens with beginners or when training to failure. This can lead to injury, so be careful to control the movement.
6. Coming up too fast into an extended elbow position: this can potentially cause one to hyperextend the elbow joint. Always work through a full range of motion in a controlled fashion.
Dips Review
For chest emphasis:
-Neutral grip wider than shoulders
-Descend with forward lean
-Elbows move slightly out to sides
-Stop at point of comfortable stretch
-Ascend to straight arm position
For tricep emphasis:
-Neutral grip about shoulder width
-Descend with head up, keeping torso straight
-Elbows move backwards
-Stop at point in comfortable stretch
-Ascend to straight arm position
Side Bar 1
Common Questions
1. How far down should I go?
Descend until there is a comfortable stretch in the front of the shoulder joint. For most people, the descent is until the bottom of the chest dips below the level of the hands.
2. Should I lockout at the top?
Fully extend your arms, but do not hyperextend. The concern when locking out the elbow joint (and hyperextension as well) is that you force the bones in your arms to grind against one another which can induce irritation and inflammation. The additional concern with hyperextending the elbow joint is that you can strain one of the elbow flexors (i.e. biceps).
3. Should I use parallel or angled bars?
Use both for variety. Be careful not to use an excessively wide grip.
4. Can I do partials to work a sticking point?
If you are too weak to do full dips and do not have access to a counter-resistance machine, then yes. Otherwise, focus on full movements. The payoff if much better!
5. Should I do negatives?
Only if you can control the descent. If you cannot, then you will fall into the bottom position and risk hurting yourself. Keep in mind, negatives will make you very sore. I do not recommend them for beginners. They cause unnecessary muscle soreness.
6. Should I bend my knees or not?
Bending the knees makes the movement easier. For variety, train with the knees bent, and after a few weeks, switch over to the legs straight. With added weight and bent knees, the tendency is to lean forward more.
7. How far forward do I lean when emphasizing the chest?
Just enough to allow yourself to lean forward without rounding the shoulders.
8. How far do I let the elbows flare out to the sides when emphasizing the chest? Do the movement without trying to keep the elbows close to your sides or force the elbows out. The elbows will flare out just a little to make the movement easier.
References
Clemente, Carmine D. Anatomy- A Regional Atlas of the Human Body. 3rd Edition. Urban and Schwarzenberg. Munich, Germany. 1987.
Norkin, Cynthia C. and Levargie, Pamela K. Joint Structure and Function: A Comprehensive Analysis, 2nd Edition. F.A. Davis Company, Philadelphia, PA. 1992.
Thompson, Clem W. and Floyd, R.T. Manual of Structural Kinesiology, 12th Edition. Mosby Year Book, Inc. St. Louis, MI. 1992.
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