How to do dips properly: technique, mistakes and variations

How to do dips with clean technique, which mistakes actually cost you your shoulders, and how to scale the exercise to your current strength.

You can knock out twenty press-ups without much thought, then you get on the dip bars and stall at rep three. Nothing has gone wrong. Dips are simply harder: you are lifting your whole body weight, the shoulder travels into a deeper position than it does on any bench press, and stabilising the load is your job rather than a machine's.

That depth is exactly why the exercise builds the chest and triceps so well, and also why plenty of people end up nursing a sore shoulder because of it. Almost everything that hurts in a dip can be sorted with three levers: how deep you go, how wide the bars are, and how many reps you grind out after your technique has already gone.

What the exercise is and which muscles it works

A dip is a bodyweight press on two parallel bars. You grip them, push up to straight arms, lower yourself by bending the elbows, then press back to the top.

The bulk of the work is shared by the lower portion of the pectorals, the triceps and the front of the shoulder. Alongside those, the muscles holding your shoulder blades in place and your whole trunk are working constantly, because your legs are hanging and your body will swing if nothing is braced.

The chest-to-triceps split is not fixed. Lean forward twenty to thirty degrees and let the elbows drift slightly out, and the chest takes over. Stay upright with the elbows tucked to your ribs, and the triceps does most of it. It is the same trade-off you already know from the close-grip bench press.

The upside of dips is that the shoulder has to find its own stable position, with no bench behind you propping it up. The downside is that same freedom: if your shoulder is already grumpy, the dip will let you know quickly.

How to do it

If the bars adjust, set them slightly wider than your shoulders. Too wide forces the shoulder into an awkward rotation and shrinks the range you can genuinely control.
Get up and set your start position with arms straight but not locked hard. Pull the shoulders down and back, as though you were trying to put distance between your shoulders and your ears.
Brace your abs and squeeze your glutes, then cross your shins or keep them slightly in front of you. You want to feel like one solid piece, not a sack on a rope.
For a chest emphasis, tip the torso forward 20 to 30 degrees. For triceps, stay close to vertical.
Lower under control, around two seconds, bending the elbows backwards. Keep them at roughly 30 to 45 degrees relative to your torso.
Stop when the upper arm reaches about parallel to the floor. Go deeper only if the shoulder is happy with it, both during the set and the next morning.
Press out of the bottom with no bounce. Drive with the chest and triceps, not with a kick of the legs.
At the top, straighten the elbows but do not let the shoulders shrug up or sink into the joint. Hold the same shoulder blade position you started with.
Breathe in before you descend, out somewhere on the way back up.

The most common mistakes

Going deep too soon. Below parallel only makes sense once you own the range down to parallel. Before that, depth just dumps the load onto the front of the shoulder.
Shoulders creeping up at the bottom. If your neck disappears between your shoulders down there, you have let the shoulder blades go. That is the position where the front-of-shoulder pinch usually shows up. Regular upper-back work such as the face pull, twice a week, helps hold the position.
Elbows flaring wide. Wide elbows feel like more chest but mostly mean more shoulder. Keep them tighter than feels natural.
Swinging the legs. If the legs pendulum forward and back, momentum is doing part of each rep. Cross the ankles and squeeze the glutes.
Four inches of range with a weight belt on. Ten clean bodyweight reps beat five half reps with 20 kg hanging off you.
Too many dips in the week. Flat bench, incline, overhead press and three sets of dips all land on the same front shoulder and the same elbow.

Easier variations

If you cannot manage five clean reps, do not do dips badly. Shrink the task instead.

Assisted dip machine. Start with roughly 30 to 40 per cent of your body weight as assistance and take 5 kg off every second week.
Band over the bars. Kneel or stand on a looped band. Cheap, and it gives most of its help at the bottom, which is where you need it.
Negatives only. Jump to the top and lower for 4 to 5 seconds. Three to five reps per set, three sets, and most people have their first proper rep within a month.
Partial range. Work to half depth and add a little more each week.
Feet on a step. Some dip stations have one; your feet take a share of the load and the assistance is easy to dial down.

Harder variations

Added weight. A dipping belt and a plate. Only add load once you can do 3 sets of 10 to 12 clean reps, and add it in 2.5 to 5 kg steps.
Tempo. A 4-second descent with a one-second pause at the bottom makes the same rep count far harder without a gram of extra weight.
Bottom pause. Two seconds still in the bottom position kills the bounce and builds strength where you are weakest.
Ring dips. The rings move, so the shoulder and shoulder blade work considerably harder. Start by just holding a still support position on the rings for 20 to 30 seconds.
Denser sets. Five sets of 8 with 45 seconds of rest is a completely different stimulus to three sets of 8 with three minutes.

Alternatives if you have no dip bars

The dip station is not irreplaceable. What you want is a press where the upper arm travels behind the line of the torso and the triceps finishes the movement.

Press-ups on parallettes or low handles. Hands raised 15 to 20 cm give you depth a floor press-up cannot.
Decline bench press or close-grip bench. Both cover the same lower-chest and triceps overlap.
Weighted press-ups. A rucksack with 10 to 20 kg in it and a narrow hand position does the job when you have nothing else.
Skull crushers or cable extensions. If the triceps is the whole point, these are far kinder to the shoulder.
Bench dips do work, but they park the shoulder in an internally rotated position and people with cranky shoulders tolerate them worst. Use them as a stopgap, not as your main press.

Sets and reps

For muscle growth: 3 to 4 sets of 6 to 12 reps, 90 to 120 seconds of rest, once or twice a week. Stop each set with one or two reps left in the tank. Dips to complete failure are a poor idea because form is the first thing to go.

For strength: 3 to 5 sets of 3 to 6 reps with a belt, resting 2 to 3 minutes.

For beginners: 3 sets of 3 to 6 assisted reps, twice a week. A realistic rate of progress is one or two extra reps a month for the first six months.

A simple progression rule: once you hit three sets of 12 with full range and no swing, add 2.5 kg and drop back to sets of 6 to 8.

Who they suit, and when to leave them alone

Dips are worth doing for anyone with a basic pressing base and healthy shoulders. They are particularly useful if you train with minimal kit, because one station covers chest and triceps through a long range.

Skip them if you have live pain at the front of the shoulder, if the shoulder has dislocated in the past, or if the bottom position gives you pain in the breastbone. If you are coming back from a shoulder problem, build the base first; we covered that in the piece on shoulder injury prevention, and the specific work for the small stabilisers is in the article on rotator cuff training.

Pain right at the point of the elbow usually means too much triceps volume too quickly. Halve the number of sets for a fortnight before you decide the exercise is the problem.

When to see a doctor

See a doctor if shoulder pain lasts more than two or three weeks despite backing off training, if the shoulder feels like it is slipping out, if you get weakness, numbness or pins and needles down the arm, or if the pain wakes you at night. The same goes for sharp pain that appeared suddenly mid-set.

The short version

Dips are one of the most useful upper-body bodyweight exercises going, as long as you do not trade depth for ego. Keep the shoulder blades set, elbows close, lower to parallel, and add weight only once your technique survives twelve reps. If the shoulder still complains after you have cleaned all that up, swap the exercise out. There are plenty of others that do the same job.