Great forgotten exercise — Parallel bar dips
23 March 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Great forgotten exercise; parallel bar dips: when it comes to building lower pectorals, triceps and frontal deltoids, dips are without doubt one the best exercises Ive ever used. They are seldom used nowadays and the reasons are plain to see: you have to be able to handle your own bodyweight for reps unless you have access to one of those fancy-dan machines that allow you to dip (or chin) with less than body weight.
A correctly done dip has two distinct rep-stroke lengths, two levels: drop down until upper arms are parallel to the floor or go all the way down as far as you can. Either depth works the triceps exquisitely, assuming you lockout hard at the top of every rep and hold that flexion for a beat before lower yet again. The parallel tricep dip is a tricep isolation movement with some slight pectoral and front deltoid stimulation.
The full dip is an entirely different animal. In a full dip you lower down as far as humanly possible often you will have to actually relax the muscles of the shoulder girdle in order to achieve the maximum low position. When you start to arise in the full dip the chin is kept on the chest and the athlete leans into the dip to trigger the pectoral muscles. At mid-point throw the chin skyward and finish the exercise using the triceps. Again, for maximum tricep stimulation lock the arm out completely and hold the maximum flexion for a full one second count before lowering.
Now a lot of really strong guys can do dips while wearing a belt that allows them to dangle extra poundage but in 8 out of 10 cases most use shallow rep strokes and dont lock out at the top. I always advise an athlete to extend the rep range-of-motion instead of adding extra poundage. 2-3 sets to failure are recommended. The perfect session placement for dip inclusion is after chest work and before triceps. As Ive stated before there are a myriad of reasons that chest exercise should be followed by tricep exercise and the finest segue from pecs to tris is the dip, preferably the ultra-deep style. The ultra-dip requires pec stimulation to get the body started upward from the low position and requires triceps to finish off the rep stroke.
Here is a tip from the Purposefully Primitive Handbook or old Indian Tricks: start off with a set or two of ultra-dips and as they become impossible due to fatigue, switch to parallel dips so as to keep the party train rolling. Once you are burnt out on dips, start with heavy tricep work such as nose-breakers, standing overhead tricep extensions using a single dumbbell and finish off with cable pushdowns of different varieties. Happy dipping!
And now for something completely different I was talking with a 20-something young man the other day excellent athlete and made a Monty Python reference that went over his head he looked at me and said, What in the hell is the Minister of Funny Walks? Why are you talking like that? Of course I dont know much about .50-cent or why he went to the trouble to first buy Mike Tysons mansion and then spend millions on bling renovations that included resurfacing the pool table with Louis Vitton (?) logosthe generational cultural divide is deepening I sat down and watched Mr. Marshall Mathers Eight Mile movie with the determined enthusiasm and spirit a serious anthropologist would exercise when studying an interesting aboriginal sub-culture.(Mind if we dance wif yo dates?) I have to remind myself of way back when and my Irish dad would shake his head in disbelief over my obsession with Otis and James Brown, this back in 67so has anything really changed? Cannot say with any musical or cultural certaintythoughts?
Tired of steroid talk? Me tooso lets talk about physical renovation what is the quickest way to radically improve your body? Get on a kick-ass free-weight progressive resistance weight training program, start taking power walks around the block (trying to best your previous best) and clean up the food selection. As my old nutritional guru, John Parrillo, oft says, foods you buy from the grocery store, properly used, can get you 90% of the way towards your nutritional goal. Quit looking for the miracle supplement, product or method; old school concepts and methods coupled with old school psychological traits like discipline, denial, hard work, perseverance, and patience, complete the package. We can provide the tactics if you can provide the psychological traits.
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