How many bodyweight dips to be a superhuman athlete?
Wondering how you measure up against the strongest calisthenics athletes in the world? Test your strength and muscular endurance by doing bodyweight dips – a fundamental calisthenics skill.
Dips are an impressive exercise in their own right, and a foundational strength skill for advanced movements including muscle-ups, planche, handstand push-ups, back levers, and ring skills. Dips also play a role in L-sit to handstand press, and advanced push-up variations. Dips develop versatile upper body pushing strength which makes them a cornerstone exercise in calisthenics.
But how many should you be able to do if you want to be superhuman?
How many bodyweight dips can most people do?
Here’s what’s considered decent for people who strength train regularly:
Men: 8-10 consecutive bodyweight dips
Women: 3-5 consecutive bodyweight dips
What is a bodyweight dip?
A bodyweight dip involves lowering and raising your entire body using your arms. Starting with straight arms supporting your body weight, bend your elbows to lower yourself until your upper arms are parallel to the ground, then push back up to the starting position.
What equipment should you do dips on?
Dips can be done on the edge of a box or bench, or between two boxes. You can even do dips off a couple of chairs. In the gym, most people do dips using:
- Parallel bars
- Dip station
- Gymnastics rings
- Parallettes
Parallettes are designed for dipping, and will give you the right range of motion with plenty of stability.
Do dips work chest, shoulders, or triceps?
Bodyweight dips are a compound exercise that work the triceps (the main driver of the pressing movement), chest, and shoulders (particularly the anterior delts). You can slightly alter the focus on the working muscles by leaning forward or keeping your body more upright during dips.
How many dips is elite level?
Want to leave behind average and enter the realm of the elite? You’ll turn heads at the gym if you achieve these numbers – especially if you’ve got impeccable form!
Men: 25-30 consecutive bodyweight dips
Women: 18-25 consecutive bodyweight dips
How many dips to be superhuman?
Want to become a gym legend? These are the superhuman dip standards that will etch your name in gym lore:
Men: 40+ consecutive bodyweight dips
Women: 30+ consecutive bodyweight dips
How to get better at dips
Dips might look simple, but they demand strength, control, and good joint health (think elbows and wrists). They’re more challenging than they seem! Here's a strategy to boost your dip game:
- Warm up with wrist exercises and shoulder mobility work.
- Perform 3 sets of dips to failure, 3 times per week
- Take 2 minutes rest between sets
- Each week, aim to add 1-2 reps to your total across all sets
- On non-dip days, focus on stretching and mobility work for chest, shoulders, and triceps
Try the Gravity Fitness bodyweight dip challenges
Ready to put your dip strength to the test? Take on our benchmark dip challenges and tag us online if you share the results!
The dip ladder
Start with 1 dip, rest for 10 seconds. Do 2 dips, rest for 10 seconds. Keep adding one rep per set until you can't complete the next level. How high can you climb?
21 dip salute
Complete 21 dips as quickly as possible, breaking them into as few sets as you can manage. Or can you go unbroken?
Dip and pause
This is a max reps challenge with a twist. Perform as many dips as you can without needing to rest – but each rep has a true 1 second pause at bottom of the rep (when your elbows are bent). How many can you get?
The Gravity Fitness team would love to see how you get on. Who’s our King and Queen of Dips? Join our online community and share your dips!
