What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
Today I want to show you how to do dips if you want to build a more muscular chest.
There are four things you’ll need to do, and make sure you’re doing them on every
rep.
It’s for both the safety of your shoulders – because this exercise can do a number,
especially if you’re doing them incorrectly – secondly, how to make sure your chest
is doing most of the work.
I think that’s the big problem, when it comes to dips.
We have the opportunity for he triceps and shoulders to dominate this movement.
If you want the chest to do the most work, do what I’m going to show you right here.
First, when you get setup for the dip, before you even go down into your first rep, position
your body correctly.
You’ve heard me talk about this before.
I want you to slide your body and chest forward.
Slide your body through your arms.
What that will do is place your chest in front of your shoulders.
As we know, from watching this channel, whatever muscle is out in front is going to bear that
load a lot more directly.
So, if you allow your shoulders to round and get in front of your chest here, you’re
asking for your shoulders to do more of the initial push out of the bottom of a dip.
Meaning, less work, less growth for your chest.
If you get your chest out in front of the shoulder here, now you’re positioning it
correctly.
At the same time, you want to position your body in an anterior, or tilted forward position.
Why is that?
Because, once again, what are we really doing with a dip?
We’re doing a suspended pushup.
If we could do dips suspended in midair it would look like a pushup on the ground.
That’s what puts most of the work on the chest itself and puts us in a position to
work the chest the most.
What you don’t want to do, what you never want to do is go from a position of really
leaning forward at the bottom.
And then come back up to an upright position at the top, and go back down, and do this
sliding motion.
You’re doing a horrible number on the anterior capsule of your shoulder by doing that.
So, you want to avoid that at all costs.
Once you get yourself into that forward tilted position you stay there.
Again, you act as if you’re doing pushups suspended in air right out of that position,
into a stable position.
Now we want to provide more stability through the shoulder because it’s important, due
to the risks that are involved in this exercise.
You can do that by setting the shoulder blades in the right position.
You do that by depressing them at the top.
Don’t allow yourself to sink into a dip.
A lot of us get lazy or forget to do this.
We allow ourselves and our body to sink down, letting our traps ride up toward our ears.
The proper way to do this, and the proper way to stabilize your shoulders for safety
is to depress, and actively push down, and then maintain that through every dip.
If you start to see, as you fatigue, those shoulders start to creep up because you can’t
support your own bodyweight, you’re going to want to cut your reps short there and stop
your set.
It could be the fact that your serratus anterior is weak and not allowing you to maintain this
depressed position.
That would be something you’d want to work on.
We have videos on how to do that as well.
Now, we finally get to the point where we’re actually dipping.
The bottom of the dip, I always say, is how you push out of the bottom that matters the
most.
We tend to push straight down through our hands, making this a very vertical movement.
Really, what you want to think of is, if you’re doing a bench-press, and we know so much about
the value of adduction, when it comes to training the chest; you want to think about how to
apply adduction to a fixed-handle dip.
All you have to do is focus, not on your hands pushing down, but focus on your elbows and
your biceps, and get them closer to your sides.
So, I’m directing my force inward, not downward.
By squeezing in with my biceps toward my lats on every, single rep I’ve instantly activated
the chest a lot more.
This is one of those gamechanger tips where, as soon as you try this, on your very next
rep you’re going to feel it a whole hell of a lot more in your chest.
We can finalize this and make it even more effective by not just stopping there.
When I’m at the top of the dip, if I pause momentarily – again, don’t focus on pushing
down through the handles.
At the very top, try to squeeze the handles in.
I know they’re not going to go anywhere, but what you’re looking for is the effect
of creating that isometric adduction at the top to get more activation of the chest, and
you descend back into the next rep.
So, if you roll all these together, into this dip exercise here, it’s going to become
much more effective.
Specifically, in helping you build a bigger chest.
Taking away some of that focus from the delts.
Taking away some of that focus from the triceps because that’s not what we’re trying to
do in this particular instance.
If you guys found this video helpful, make sure to leave your comments and thumbs up
below.
Tell me what else you want me to cover and I’ll do that for you.
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In the meantime, if you’re looking for programs that put the science back in strength – it
is important to do these things right, guys.
You can’t just go out there and tell people how to do a dip and not understand what’s
going on in the shoulders.
That is key to what we do here at ATHLEANX.
We put the science back in strength in every one of our programs.
They’re over at ATHLEANX.com.
All right, guys.
I’ll talk to you again soon.
See you.