Originally Posted by
Maybach
Insofar as the dip improves strength, it only gets stronger when you add weight.
Chins work the same way. They start with a rep progression instead of adding weight for two main reasons:
1) At the stage they are added into programming, the trainee is usually adding bodyweight. An "isochoric" chin up workout therefore represents a strength increase. For those trainees that might not, adding reps is reasonable training "heuristic"
Programming chins for trainees beyond the novice stage needs to take this into account. The bodyweight chins for an intermediate are not a primary training stress: they're effectively a "light day." If you are programming no weighted chins for a trainee who is maintaining their bodyweight, you are probably not doing them a whole lot of good
2) From an ergonomic, practical, and physiological point of view, chins are a pain in the ass to load. This is probably the most important reason. They are not a barbell movement, so the ergonomic benefits of that equipment are lost. The problem of adding weight such that the weight is secure, evenly distributed, and freely incrementable has no straightforward solution: one or more of those things must be sacrificed to achieve the others in the absence of specialized equipment. Notably, the most common solution (barbell weights suspended from a belt or chain) is neither stable nor evenly distributed.
Further, the control of the weight added is not straightforward. The weight you are actually moving changes with your outfit and breakfast and how big a shit you took this morning. This can be ameliorated somewhat by weighing yourself and micro loading the movement appropriately but at that point it is basically no longer worth it.
Finally, the movement itself is not really suited for loading in this way. It's puts a lot of stress through small joints bot really made to resist it (the arms and shoulders are much better at resisting compression than tension), and at upper limits of weight becomes more taxing than it is worth, partially due to the ergonomic deficiencies noted above. Some idle evolutionary speculation might note that rarely has a primate of any kind ever had to pull up anything above it's bodyweight much bigger than a particularly fat baby, and at any rate the human solution to this problem (as the babies got fatter) was to simply remain on the ground in the long term, which seems to have worked out alright.
Why am I giving you this long explanation of chins in a question about dips? Because dips have every single one of these disadvantages, with the addition that they are not an independent movement pattern from the main lifts: they are just awkward bench presses.
IF an intermediate trainee, in spite of all of these disadvantages, wishes to make further progress on chins, they will find that they MUST include weighted chin ups. These disadvantages compound such that most trainees at this stage find that simply progressing their deadlift and presses does most of the work progressing their chins might do. A trainee that wishes to progress their dips *will invariably* find that progressing their bench press does everything that progressing their dips might do.
To summarize: if you wish to progress your dips, you will have to add weight. The fact that you are doing 35 unweighted dips means you almost certainly do not need to progress your dips.
Reply With Quote
Member
✓ Member
Posting Permissions