How To do Bench Dips
Starting Position: While sitting on the edge of a bench, place your hands next to your sides with your fingers facing forwards.
Place your feet slightly out in front of you, and then lift your body off the bench.
Form: Inhale as you lower down towards the floor. Hold for a brief second and then exhale and press your self back up away from the floor.
Personal Trainer Tips: With this exercise pay close attention to your range of motion. The further you lower yourself, the more stress you place on the shoulder. So only go up to 90 degrees at the elbow. It is okay to use a limited range of motion based on your body.
If your shoulders feel stiff, avoid this exercise or spend a lot of time stretching your shoulders, chest muscles, and lats.
Bench Dips – Benefits
- Bench dips are a compound exercise as they worked multiple muscle groups simultaneously. Although this bodyweight exercise mainly targets the triceps, it also hits your chest and front of your shoulder.
- Bench dips are one of the most effective exercises to increase arm strength and also build lean muscle in your upper arms.
- Bench dips are a closed kinetic chain exercise and express that you do the movements around a fixed point. It increases compression force on your joints thereby improving stability.
The triceps muscles are the three-part muscle structure that covers the back of the arm. The main purpose in back arm muscle movements is to focus on the triceps muscles. As most movements work all of the triceps muscles, there are muscle groups in which they are the main area of influence.
There are many exercises to build the triceps muscles, but instead of doing all these movements in the same workout, focus on choosing exercises that emphasize all different parts of the triceps.
Bench Dips – Muscles Worked
This exercise focuses primarily on the triceps but also works your pecs, front of your shoulders (anterior deltoids), traps (trapezius), and back muscles (latissimus dorsi).
