Starting Strength

kipping pull-ups or chin-ups in a conditioning workout, make sure your shoulders and arms are strong enough to do 8–10 strict reps first so that you don’t hurt yourself chasing a meaningless number. If you cut this important corner, shoulder surgery may be the only reward you receive.
    Weighted chins and pull-ups are an excellent source of heavy non-pressing work for the upper body. Plates are suspended from a chain on a belt, or a dumbbell can be held in the feet if not much weight is used. A good rule of thumb is that when you can do 12–15 bodyweight reps, it is probably time to start doing some of the work weighted, possibly alternating higher-rep bodyweight workouts with lower-rep weighted workouts. Several sets across are appropriate for chins and pull-ups, either weighted, unweighted, or assisted. And many people have made steady linear progress by microloading their chins the same way they program the bench press and press, adding 1.5–2 pounds to three sets of five reps every workout. Try them all and see what works best for you.
    Dips
     
    The parallel-bar dip is a movement borrowed from gymnastics. It consists of supporting yourself by the arms, between and above two parallel bars, lowering your body down, and then driving it back up. The dip is a good substitute for the bench press if it cannot be done for some reason, and is far superior to the decline bench press, which there is no good reason to do. If the “lower pecs” and triceps are the object of your desire – the apple of your eye, as it were – then dips are your exercise. They are better than the decline because, like any good exercise, they involve the movement of lots of your muscles, besides the lower pecs and triceps. In this case, dips involve the movement of your entire body; they are like pushups in this respect. They are better than pushups because they can be weighted – and thus incrementally increased in load – and performed alone, whereas pushups cannot be weighted conveniently even with two people involved.
    The quality of an exercise increases with the involvement of more muscles, more joints, and more central nervous system activity needed to control them. The more of the body involved in an exercise, the more of these criteria are met. When the whole body moves, a more nearly ideal state is achieved, with lots of muscles and nerves controlling lots of joints, and the central nervous system keeping track of lots of different pieces of the body doing many different things, hopefully correctly. By this logic, pushups are better than bench presses since pushups involve the movement and control of the entire body. But they are very difficult to do weighted, especially alone, because of the problems with loading the human body in this position. Were it possible, a good weighted pushup device would be in use today.
    It has long been assumed that the bench press has solved that problem, when in fact it hasn’t. The only thing moving in the bench press is the arms, so in this particular way the bench is to the pushup what the lat pulldown is to the pull-up. But the bench does allow the same approximate movement to be loaded, and has allowed many people to increase their pushup numbers without high-rep pushups. Without adding weight, a fit person will find it difficult to train a pressing motion moving in the anterior direction without using very high reps, which are seldom appropriate for most training goals. Dips address both problems, allowing heavy weights to be used while the entire body moves during an upper-body exercise.

    Figure 7-41. “Parallel-bar” dips, performed on an angled dip station. Note that the bottom of the movement drops the shoulders below the elbows.

    Unweighted dips are harder than pushups because the whole body is moving, not just the part that isn’t supported by the feet. And for the more advanced trainee, dips are very easy to use weighted, either by hanging plates or other objects from a belt or by holding a dumbbell between the feet (an option which works well only for light weights). The anterior aspect of the movement is provided by the slightly inclined torso position, a function of the fact that the forearms stay vertical during the whole movement. If the body’s mass is to be evenly distributed relative to the position of the hands on the bars – i.e., half of the mass in front of the hands and half of it behind the hands – then the body will have to assume an inclined position