Body Weight Dips
01. Nov, 2009 
2 Comments
Body weight dip exercises are a great way to really stimulate muscle growth in your triceps and your chest depending on your position. Regardless, both areas are going to be stimulated. It is kinda like the bench press: both muscles have to contract to execute the movement, but the positioning of your hands will change which muscle is emphasized. The wider your hands on the bar the more you hit the chest and a narrower grip will result in more triceps. As explained in the video, the angle you place your body will determine which muscle gets hit harder.
When using the dip to build your triceps a trick I like to do is to pre-exhaust the chest musculature and then compound set the triceps with either a single compound set or a triple. Compound setting is when you perform an exercise for a muscle and then with little to no rest execute another exercise for that same muscle. Here are two sample workouts that will illustrate what I mean:
A-1: Cable Cross
B-1: Body Weight Dip
B-2: Standing Cable Triceps Extensions (Rope Press Downs)
or
A-1: Standard Old School Push-up
A-2: BW Dip
A-3: Over Head Dumbbell Extension
A-4: Bent Over Dumbbell Kickback
You could set a rep range of 10-12 reps for each exercise or really go for it and go for a set to fatigue or failure for each. Play around with different rep to weight schemes and watch your arms start to grow!!!
Excellent explanation. Good demo, but a few more reps would have been better.
Daniel,
Thanks for the kind reply. I was trying to keep the video short with some main points covered. Hope it helped!