Why Dips Are Better Than The Bench Press

 

People love to bench press. It allows them to get under the bar, to lift heavy amounts of weights and work on this vanity muscles, their pectorals. However, as an exercise the bench press if of limited value since only the arms are moving. The rest of the body lies still on the bench, and as a result there is less going on. However, with an exercise like the dip the whole body is in motion, and thus the dip is better for you than the bench. In today's article we are going to take a look at the dip, and show you why it is a better exercise for a variety of reasons.

As a general principle, the value and quality of any exercise increases with the involvement of more muscles and joints. This is because the more you are doing, the more nervous system activity is going on to help control your body. If you only move your arms, your brain and nervous system are only moderately challenged, whereas if you move your whole body becomes involved resulting in greater activity and neural activity. If you follow this logic than push-ups are better than the bench press, and dips are better than the push-up. Why?

Simply because the push-up involves the usage of more of your body than the bench, which causes you to simply lie on the ground. On the other hand, you cannot add weights to the push-up, such that it requires greater numbers to achieve fatigue, something that is not always desirable. On the other hand, the dip involves your whole body and allows you use weights, making it thus the best form of exercise of the three.

Unweighted dips are harder to do than push-ups since you are using your whole body. It still focuses tremendously on your chest, as well as blasting your shoulders. When you lower your body on the dip bars your forearms will remain vertical, causing your shoulder to move forward and down. As a result your upper body will tilt forward as your legs swing back behind you so as to balance your weight out as you lower down. There is still a ton of work being done by your pectoral muscles, especially the lower belly of the pecs, which is why the dip is a vastly superior exercise to the decline bench press, which can be ignored altogether.

 

 

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