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Arm isolation · Bodyweight

Dip

Your whole bodyweight on two bars, lowered and pressed back up. It is by a distance the heaviest thing in this group, it trains the chest and the front of the shoulders alongside the triceps, and it is the movement where the depth argument actually has measurements behind it.

Stop when the upper arms reach level.

The cue Reckoner puts on your wrist mid set.
Pattern
Arm isolation
Trains
Triceps, chest, front delts
Kit
Bodyweight, dip bars
Loading
Your own bodyweight
Reckoner prescribes
3 sets of 10 to 15 reps at RPE 8
Progression step
Nothing to add, so the sets climb instead
Skill
Technical
Recovery cost
Moderate
Not prescribed if you have declared
Shoulder, elbow

Muscles worked

Primary
Triceps · Chest · Front delts
Secondary
Upper back

How to do it

  1. Get on the bars with the arms straight

    Support yourself at the top with the elbows locked and the shoulders pulled down away from your ears. Cross the ankles behind you and keep the whole body still. If you cannot hold the top position without sinking, that hold is the exercise for now.

  2. Decide how much you are leaning

    Upright puts more of it on the triceps. Leaning forward from the hips brings the chest in. Pick one before the set rather than drifting between them, because a lean that changes halfway through changes what the reps are worth.

  3. Lower until the upper arms are level

    Stop when the upper arms reach level. That is the cue Reckoner puts on your wrist, and it is roughly where the measured lifters stopped: bar dips in a laboratory reached about 88 per cent of the same lifters' own maximum shoulder extension range1.

  4. Press back up without shrugging

    Drive back to a locked elbow with the shoulders staying down. If the shoulders rise toward the ears at the top, the traps have taken the finish of the rep off you and the range you just did was shorter than it looked.

What goes wrong

How Reckoner progresses this lift

Six weeks of this lift, run through the real engine. Nothing below was typed in: the prescription, the decision and the sentence beside it all come from the same code that writes your week.

Dip, six weeks
WeekPrescribedWhat it did
13 x 10More reps 10 → 11 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does.
23 x 11More reps 11 → 12 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does.
33 x 12More reps 12 → 13 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does.
43 x 13More reps 13 → 14 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does.
53 x 14Deload 40% of sets offFive weeks of building, then one week lighter. About 40% of the sets come off. The load holds and your reps stay where you earned them, so you keep the strength and lose the fatigue.
62 x 14More reps 14 → 15 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. The lighter week is over, so this is back to three sets.

Real engine output, not an illustration. Every row was produced by running the engine itself when this page was generated.

The full rule, and why the reps move before the load does, is in how Reckoner decides to add weight.

Questions people ask

Chest dip or triceps dip?

That distinction is a coaching convention rather than a measured one. The study that compared dips compared bench, bar and rings, not an upright torso against a forward lean, and nobody has published that comparison1. What is measured is that the bar dip beat the bench dip in six muscles at once, the pectoralis major and the triceps among them1, so the honest answer is that the bar dip trains both and the lean shifts the emphasis by an amount nobody has put a number on.

Why can I do so few of these when I can do plenty of push-ups?

Because a dip is close to your whole bodyweight through two arms and a push-up is a fraction of it through a lever. That is a fact about the geometry rather than about you. It also makes the dip the movement in this group that runs out of room last: most people can add reps to it for a long time before they need to hang plates off a belt.

What does Reckoner do when this lift stalls?

There is nothing to add to your own bodyweight, so once you top the rep range comfortably it adds a working set rather than load. When the lift stalls there is no weight to ease either, so it goes straight to offering another movement from the group below.

Similar movements

There is no load to ease on this lift, so Reckoner offers one of these the first time it stalls. Each of them has a page.

Bench dipCable overhead triceps extensionClose-grip push-upDumbbell skullcrusherEZ bar skullcrusherOverhead dumbbell triceps extensionRope press-downVest close-grip push-upWeighted dip

Sources

  1. McKenzie and colleagues, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2022. Bench, bar, and ring dips: do kinematics and muscle activity differ? thirteen experienced men across three dip variations, the bar dip using about 88 per cent of tested maximum shoulder extension, six muscles including the pectoralis major and triceps more active on the bar than the bench, and the anterior shoulder named as the structure loaded by extension range
  2. McKenzie and colleagues, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2022. Fatigue increases muscle activations but does not change maximal joint angles during the bar dip fifteen men averaging about twenty five bar dips to exhaustion, repetition duration rising from 1.35 to 2.24 seconds, vertical displacement falling by about forty millimetres, and peak pectoralis major and triceps activation rising with fatigue