Bodyweight triceps exercises

How much goes to the triceps and how much to the chest?

A push-up is shared work: the chest, the front delt and the triceps press together. Narrowing your hands does not switch the chest off, it only shifts the proportions, and the atlas says so plainly - the close-grip push-up description tells you to push yourself up with the triceps and the chest, both at once.

Bench dips move those proportions harder, because the upper arm travels behind the line of your torso, where the chest has very little leverage. The closest thing to isolation is the kneeling extension and the overhead version, where the shoulder stays put and only the elbow moves. The price is load: it is a fraction of what you handle on a push-up, and in the overhead version the resistance comes purely from tension you create yourself.

One simple thing follows. If your week already has push-ups in it, adding dips changes more for the triceps than another push-up variation does, because it brings in an arm position that was not there before.

Why do bench dips bother some shoulders?

On a dip your hand is locked behind your torso while your whole body travels down. The shoulder goes into extension and internal rotation, a position plenty of people feel at the front of the joint, especially deep. The descriptions in the atlas set the limit themselves: you go down until your upper arms are parallel to the floor or your elbows make a right angle, and that is where the rep ends.

If the front of your shoulder still complains at that depth, nothing forces you to do dips. The push-up family gives you the same elbow extension with your hands in front of you, and the kneeling and plank extensions restrict the shoulder even further. The bent-knee version is also a gentler way in than the straight-leg one, because it lets you control how much weight really ends up on your arms.