From Blog
When mistakes feel right
Dip bars are called parallel bars, but nobody said parallel to the floor. I dropped the back end so the wrist stays straight through the descent and the load sits mid-palm.
Published
by Adarsh Gopal
Why are dip bars parallel to the floor? Hell, they’re even called parallel bars. Except the name means parallel to each other. Nobody said anything about the floor.
So here’s what I am trying out as an experiment. Not-so-parallel dip bars.
On a regular level bar, as you go down the elbows travel back behind the hands. The forearm tilts but the bar does not budge. That angle has to go somewhere and it goes into the wrist. Your wrist goes into ulnar deviation, extension. All with your BW on top. That biases the load onto the ulnar side of the wrist.
So I dropped the back of the bar. The dip bar is no longer parallel to the floor. If you draw a line, it will touch the floor. The wrist stays straight as you descend, because the bar is now angled the same way the forearm is. Load sits in the middle of the palm instead of one corner of it.
That sets off a subtle chain of movement along the arm, shoulder and scapula. Screw your hands into the floor in a push-up and you get external rotation. That cue works by taking the wrist out of ulnar deviation. Tilting the bar does the same thing without the cue.
Why this matters?
Dips have a ‘reputation’ for being ‘hard’ on the shoulders. Part of it is the position it forces the person doing the exercise into. End range shoulder extension with your BW on it, the anterior capsule, labrum and biceps tendon taking the strain while the cuff tries to keep the ball in the socket. Internal rotation and shrugging into it make it worse, and most people do both.
As subtle as a few degrees sounds, the wrist is the first joint in the chain. Changing how the wrist is loaded changes how everything further up the chain behaves. That’s the idea I want to play around with.
Courtesy of a welder who wasn’t paying attention. I’ll report back.