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  • What's up, guys?

  • Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.

  • Today I want to show you how to do dips if you want to build a more muscular chest.

  • There are four things you'll need to do, and make sure you're doing them on every

  • rep.

  • It's for both the safety of your shouldersbecause this exercise can do a number,

  • especially if you're doing them incorrectlysecondly, how to make sure your chest

  • is doing most of the work.

  • I think that's the big problem, when it comes to dips.

  • We have the opportunity for he triceps and shoulders to dominate this movement.

  • If you want the chest to do the most work, do what I'm going to show you right here.

  • First, when you get setup for the dip, before you even go down into your first rep, position

  • your body correctly.

  • You've heard me talk about this before.

  • I want you to slide your body and chest forward.

  • Slide your body through your arms.

  • What that will do is place your chest in front of your shoulders.

  • As we know, from watching this channel, whatever muscle is out in front is going to bear that

  • load a lot more directly.

  • So, if you allow your shoulders to round and get in front of your chest here, you're

  • asking for your shoulders to do more of the initial push out of the bottom of a dip.

  • Meaning, less work, less growth for your chest.

  • If you get your chest out in front of the shoulder here, now you're positioning it

  • correctly.

  • At the same time, you want to position your body in an anterior, or tilted forward position.

  • Why is that?

  • Because, once again, what are we really doing with a dip?

  • We're doing a suspended pushup.

  • If we could do dips suspended in midair it would look like a pushup on the ground.

  • That's what puts most of the work on the chest itself and puts us in a position to

  • work the chest the most.

  • What you don't want to do, what you never want to do is go from a position of really

  • leaning forward at the bottom.

  • And then come back up to an upright position at the top, and go back down, and do this

  • sliding motion.

  • You're doing a horrible number on the anterior capsule of your shoulder by doing that.

  • So, you want to avoid that at all costs.

  • Once you get yourself into that forward tilted position you stay there.

  • Again, you act as if you're doing pushups suspended in air right out of that position,

  • into a stable position.

  • Now we want to provide more stability through the shoulder because it's important, due

  • to the risks that are involved in this exercise.

  • You can do that by setting the shoulder blades in the right position.

  • You do that by depressing them at the top.

  • Don't allow yourself to sink into a dip.

  • A lot of us get lazy or forget to do this.

  • We allow ourselves and our body to sink down, letting our traps ride up toward our ears.

  • The proper way to do this, and the proper way to stabilize your shoulders for safety

  • is to depress, and actively push down, and then maintain that through every dip.

  • If you start to see, as you fatigue, those shoulders start to creep up because you can't

  • support your own bodyweight, you're going to want to cut your reps short there and stop

  • your set.

  • It could be the fact that your serratus anterior is weak and not allowing you to maintain this

  • depressed position.

  • That would be something you'd want to work on.

  • We have videos on how to do that as well.

  • Now, we finally get to the point where we're actually dipping.

  • The bottom of the dip, I always say, is how you push out of the bottom that matters the

  • most.

  • We tend to push straight down through our hands, making this a very vertical movement.

  • Really, what you want to think of is, if you're doing a bench-press, and we know so much about

  • the value of adduction, when it comes to training the chest; you want to think about how to

  • apply adduction to a fixed-handle dip.

  • All you have to do is focus, not on your hands pushing down, but focus on your elbows and

  • your biceps, and get them closer to your sides.

  • So, I'm directing my force inward, not downward.

  • By squeezing in with my biceps toward my lats on every, single rep I've instantly activated

  • the chest a lot more.

  • This is one of those gamechanger tips where, as soon as you try this, on your very next

  • rep you're going to feel it a whole hell of a lot more in your chest.

  • We can finalize this and make it even more effective by not just stopping there.

  • When I'm at the top of the dip, if I pause momentarilyagain, don't focus on pushing

  • down through the handles.

  • At the very top, try to squeeze the handles in.

  • I know they're not going to go anywhere, but what you're looking for is the effect

  • of creating that isometric adduction at the top to get more activation of the chest, and

  • you descend back into the next rep.

  • So, if you roll all these together, into this dip exercise here, it's going to become

  • much more effective.

  • Specifically, in helping you build a bigger chest.

  • Taking away some of that focus from the delts.

  • Taking away some of that focus from the triceps because that's not what we're trying to

  • do in this particular instance.

  • If you guys found this video helpful, make sure to leave your comments and thumbs up

  • below.

  • Tell me what else you want me to cover and I'll do that for you.

  • Any of our videos here, guys.

  • This channel is for you.

  • If you haven't already, please subscribe and make sure you turn on your notifications

  • so you never miss one of my videos.

  • In the meantime, if you're looking for programs that put the science back in strengthit

  • is important to do these things right, guys.

  • You can't just go out there and tell people how to do a dip and not understand what's

  • going on in the shoulders.

  • That is key to what we do here at ATHLEANX.

  • We put the science back in strength in every one of our programs.

  • They're over at ATHLEANX.com.

  • All right, guys.

  • I'll talk to you again soon.

  • See you.

What's up, guys?

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