Creating a list of exercises that are successfully avoided at the gym, you can certainly put the chest dips on your list, based on the weight of your body. Why, despite the fact that they give great results, are they overlooked?Chest dips, also known as dips in a cage or Swedish dips, are technically demanding and require a certain strength of the trainee. This means that a certain amount of force in the chest muscles is required to perform them, which will allow the body weight of the trainee to be used in the exercise. Not every trainee is strong enough to use the potential of the exercise, for example, in the repetitive ranges that stimulate hypertrophy. What's more, the exercise is technically demanding, which makes many people performing it feel uncomfortable in the shoulders or the sternum.
How to do chest-dips properly?
Before you begin exercising, it’s essential to warm up or exercise before the dips to warm up the entire upper limb rim. This is extremely important because, as mentioned in the introduction, we use a lot of muscle power to do the push-ups, which will involve load on our joints at the beginning of the exercise, at least among beginners and intermediate people.
Exercise begins with the rod grip, neutral grip facing the dorsal surface of the palm outside. Once the grip has stabilized, we must maintain body weight, tearing the legs off the rack or spurting out of the ground, including stabilizing the shoulders. We can achieve this by introducing an external rotation movement that eliminates the backlash in articulation bags. This is a key issue when it comes to joint safety and the effectiveness of the exercise itself. The absence of a rotational component is known by changing the distribution of forces acting on the shoulder joint, which manifests itself in pain or sternum pain.
Having already prepared the position, we make the lowering motion of the torso, keeping in mind that its main range is by changing the plane of the torso and changing the angular position in the shoulder joints, limiting the retraction of the elbow to the rear. Leaving down, we breathe in, remembering that the movement itself takes about 2-3 seconds, and then pushing the body, we exhale.
Why is this exercise worth our attention?
Performing dips is recommended as it’s a functional multi-joint exercise, and the muscular area involved in the movement is really remarkable. By doing push-ups on handrails we stimulate mainly:
- Smaller and larger chest muscles
- Shoulder muscles
- Frontal tooth muscle
As we can see, the main muscle groups involved in the movement and the stabilization of the rim are heavily involved in the performance of the push-ups. In addition, making push push-ups also involves:
- Widest back
- Muscles responsible for the wrist (flexors, rectifiers)
- Quadrilateral ridge
Regular push-ups on handrails support the extension of the entire upper limb rim. Although the placement of the elbows and the inclination of the torso make it possible to engage more strongly with the thoracic or triceps muscles, this is a multi-tasking exercise, so isolating one muscle group is extremely difficult. This means that the benefits of dips are much greater than just the impact on the chest muscles and triceps.
How do we start when we do not have the strength to do one repetition?
If our figure is still too weak to use the full potential of the exercise, we can use several methods that will bring us closer to the full series of dips:
- The first way is to base on the negative phases. Negative repetitions are nothing but the use of the part of the exercise itself, which consists of slow lowering, we get out of the leg, and the movement of the lower is controlled by the force of the muscles
- The second way is to use the training gloves we stick to the sticks, it will help us make a positive phase exercise
- The third way is to start with the triceps and chest reinforcement that allow us to perform the exercise, but here we do not rely on the push-ups, and we use other exercises in the development of muscle strength groups responsible for the movement, mainly for example using negative slants or push-ups
- The fourth way is the reverse pump, which will mainly develop the muscles of the arms, but it’s an opportunity to get acquainted with the method of stabilizing the shoulder girdle
- The fifth way, which I personally would not recommend, is to shorten the exercise movement, which on the side may look a little comical and immediately comes to the realization that the person performing the exercise has significant strength and technical problems. It can be said that it’s conscious motion sickness.
Chest dips - summary
Chest dips, even though they are technically demanding, and which require some effort and mistakes, as well as feeling in the work of the muscles, perfectly affect the development of the entire upper limb rim. Basic exercise, multi-tasking, not replaceable with other machines or exercises. It should be a basic exercise for bodybuilders or combat sports, especially those based on strong shoulder rim. Push-ups should also be made by swimmers, volleyballers, gymnasts, tennis players or basketball players.
