How To Do the Dip
Three ways to dip, and researchers measured all three. The one beginners are told to start with is the one that puts your shoulder in the worst position. Here is the order that actually makes sense.
Start here
A dip is you holding yourself up on your arms, lowering until your elbows bend, and pressing back up. It hits your chest and triceps hard, and it is one of the few upper body moves where you are pressing your whole bodyweight.
Three common versions: hands behind you on a bench, hands on parallel bars, hands on rings.
The usual advice is to start on the bench because it feels easiest. The evidence says that advice has it backwards, and I will show you why.
The three versions are measurably different
Thirteen experienced men performed bench dips, bar dips and ring dips while researchers recorded 3D motion capture and EMG.
Peak triceps activation came out at 0.83 mV on the bench, 1.04 mV on the bar and 1.05 mV on the rings. So the bar and ring versions worked the triceps harder, and were close to each other.
But the more important line in that study is about the bench dip: it predominantly targets the triceps while requiring greater shoulder extension range.
That is the catch. On a bench dip your hands are behind you and fixed, so as you lower, your upper arms travel backwards past your torso. Your shoulder gets pushed into extension, and you cannot escape it because your hands cannot move.
The authors' own conclusion was that the bar dip is an appropriate progression from the bench dip because of the higher activation. Fine. But note what that means: the bench dip gives you less triceps work in exchange for more shoulder extension. That is a bad trade for a lot of people.
One documented way this goes wrong
A young man training on parallel bars with a grip wider than shoulder width heard a click in the front of his chest. Imaging showed a stress fracture of the manubrium, the top segment of the sternum. He was treated conservatively with rest and activity modification, though he went back to training almost immediately because of a military camp.
I want to be careful here. This is one person. A single case report is the weakest evidence there is, and sternal stress fractures are explicitly described as rare. You should not read this and decide dips are dangerous.
What is worth taking from it is the detail the authors bothered to record: the grip was wider than shoulder width. A wide grip on a dip pushes your shoulders out and your chest forward. Keeping your hands roughly under your shoulders is free, and there is no reason to go wider.
Why dips may actually be good for your shoulders
A review argued that the human shoulder evolved for closed kinetic chain loading, meaning your hands are fixed and your body moves, which is what happens climbing or supporting yourself.
Its case is that a lot of modern training is the opposite, open chain, where the hand moves through space under load, and that this mismatch may contribute to how common shoulder problems are. Closed chain loading engages the scapulothoracic and trunk stabilising mechanisms that evolved to protect the joint.
A dip is closed kinetic chain. Your hands are fixed, your body moves.
So the same lift that can put your shoulder in a rough position is also the kind of loading the review argues your shoulder is built for. Position is what separates the two.
This is a narrative review building an evolutionary argument, not a trial. It is a way of thinking, not a result.
Where the bottom of the rep gets hard
Dips share a problem with the bench press: a point where the bar, or your body, slows down and grinds.
A modelling study of the bench and overhead press traced that sticking region to shoulder torque dropping below a critical threshold, producing a local minimum in velocity. Adding elbow torque reduced the dip in speed and moved the slow point earlier in the lift.
For your dip, the practical version is: the bottom is where your shoulder is at its weakest leverage. That is the depth you have to earn rather than assume. Going deeper is not automatically better, it is just further into the position where you have least to give.
This is a model of barbell pressing, not of dips. I am handing you the mechanism, not a measurement.
How to actually do it
Start on the bars, not the bench. If bodyweight is too much, use an assisted dip machine or a band. That keeps your hands under your shoulders instead of trapped behind you.
Hands roughly shoulder width. Not wider. The one documented injury here involved a wider grip, and there is nothing to gain from it.
Set your shoulder blades down and back before you lower. Do not let your shoulders shrug up around your ears at the bottom.
Lower under control until your upper arms are around parallel with the floor, or until your shoulders tell you to stop, whichever comes first. Depth is earned.
Stay slightly forward for more chest, stay upright for more triceps. Both are legitimate.
Stop the set when your shoulders start shrugging or your chest starts collapsing forward. That is the position going, and the bottom of a dip is where you have the least margin.
Start on parallel bars with assistance rather than on a bench. The bench dip gives you less triceps work (0.83 mV versus 1.04 on the bar) while forcing your shoulder further into extension with nowhere to escape, which is the wrong trade. Keep your hands about shoulder width, because the one documented dip injury here involved a wider grip. Set your shoulder blades down before you lower, earn your depth rather than assuming it, and end the set when your shoulders start shrugging. Dips are closed chain loading, which one review argues is what your shoulder is actually built for, so position is what decides whether this lift helps or hurts you.
Limits of this evidence
- The injury evidence is a single case report, one person, which is the weakest form of clinical evidence. Sternal stress fractures are described in that same paper as rare, and nothing here establishes that dips generally cause them.
- The dip comparison study used 13 experienced men performing four repetitions each, so it is small and does not cover beginners, women, or fatigued sets.
- The muscle activation values are surface EMG amplitudes in millivolts, which indicate relative excitation under these conditions and are not a direct measure of muscle growth or strength outcomes.
- The shoulder review is a narrative evolutionary argument rather than a trial, so its practical claims are reasoning rather than measured results.
- The sticking region model describes barbell bench and overhead pressing, not dips, so its application here is inference.
- No study here compared injury rates between dip variations, so the recommendation to start on bars rather than a bench follows from the shoulder extension finding, not from outcome data.
- Every claim rests on a single source with no independent replication checked. Treat the piece as provisional.
Sources (4)
- Bench, Bar, and Ring Dips: Do Kinematics and Muscle Activity Differ? International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2022
- Stress fracture of the manubrium sterni during parallel bar dips. The Physician and Sportsmedicine, 2023
- Shoulder Complex Dysfunction Through an Evolutionary Lens: The Need for Closed Kinetic Chain Loading in Upper Extremity Program Design. Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology, 2026
- Decoding the Contribution of Shoulder and Elbow Mechanics to Barbell Kinematics and the Sticking Region in Bench and Overhead Press Exercises. Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology, 2025