Chest dips are a great exercise you can do almost anywhere and if you do weighted dips you can turn a great body weight all purpose chest exercise into an awesome mass building chest exercise as well.
Chest dips will hit your whole upper body with one simple exercise. Just like chin-ups, the chest dip uses many muscles at once in a compound fashion. This means that instead of wasting time doing flyes for chest, pushdowns for triceps and presses for shoulders all you have to do is the chest dip!
First, let’s do the basic chest dip. Some people refer to the normal pushup as a chest dip but more commonly a chest dip is what you will see below.
Form Tips: The two biggest things are to make you go all the way up and all the way down on chest dips.
When you first start to do chest dips you may be tempted to only go down a little. You have to go all the way!
Get right down until your upper arms are parallel with the floor. At the top of the dip you can lock out like I do or stop just short of lock out if your joints are sore.
On the decent of the chest dip, your body should move down and forward slightly. If you go straight down, your elbow joint has to close up into an acute angle. With all big movements the safest way to do them is to maintain a close to 90 degree angle in the closed position like you see in the chest dip video.
You can work up to chest dips in the same way you worked up to chins. Just put a bench underneath you and use it to help as much or as little as you need by pushing off with your legs. Eventually, normal chest dips become easy and you’ll want to do weighted dips. If for some reason the dip scares you, then pushups are always there and are a great alternative exercise until you get stronger.
Now lets move onto a more advanced version of the chest dip.
Weighted Dips
As you get stronger you can also strap weight around your waist and do weighted dips.
Pretty much everything stays the same as the chest dip except now you will add weight. The usual method these days for adding resistance to the weighted dip is with a dipping belt. You can also hold a dumbbell between your thighs but there is a limit to how long this will be practical.
Here are both versions in video: The Regular Chest Dip And The Weighted Dip
Here is a link to another article on this site about weighted dips using a dipping belt including my personal opinion of the specific dipping belt I use.