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I am enjoying the dip progression I kicked off back in April.
I started on fixed bars. In the beginning, 50 reps took me fourteen to fifteen minutes. By week four, I was through 50 reps in about nine minutes. That’s a big jump, and it came almost entirely from the movement getting cleaner and more efficient rather than from raw strength.
Then I got a set of AbMat rings shipped over from the US, and switched to ring dips. Rings are a different animal. The dip itself is no longer the limiting factor — stability is. Keeping the rings from flaring, holding the shoulder packed, asking the rotator cuff to do its quiet stabilising job: that’s what caps you. So I’ve kept the volume lower, around 30 reps, and started loading up instead.
Here’s me doing ring dips with 9 kg on me.
Something I keep coming back to: the slow-burn stability movements — a one-arm push-up, a ring dip — scale very gently. You add a little load, or a little instability, and the difficulty climbs fast. The big patterns are different. Squat, pull, carry, press — you can pile weight on those for years and keep progressing in relatively large jumps. Knowing which kind of movement you’re dealing with tells you how to load it, and how patient to be.
See also: Instability moves the failure point.