What causes elbow pain during dips

Going too deep, too often

Dips put a lot of load on the elbow at the bottom of the range, right when your upper arm goes past parallel to the floor. That's the position where the joint is most stressed and least stable. If you're stacking a lot of reps down there every session, the tendons around the elbow don't get much of a break.

This isn't about dips being bad. It's about dose. Going from zero dips to three sets of failure twice a week is the kind of jump that tendons hate. They adapt slower than muscle does, so the muscle feels fine while the elbow quietly falls behind.

• Cut your depth back to where your upper arm is roughly parallel to the floor, not lower
• Drop total sets for a couple weeks and see if the pain settles
• Add rest days between pressing sessions instead of hitting dips every other day

Elbows flaring out instead of tracking back

Watch your elbows in a mirror or on video. If they're winging out to the sides instead of staying tucked and tracking backward, you're putting the joint in a position it wasn't built to load repeatedly. That sideways stress tends to show up as pain on the inside of the elbow.

Keeping your elbows closer to your body and leaning forward slightly changes where the tension lands, shifting more of it onto the chest and shoulders and less onto the joint itself. It also just feels more stable once you get used to it.

Grip and wrist position feeding into it

If your wrists are cranked into an awkward angle on the bars, that tension can travel straight up into the elbow. A lot of guys grip too hard or let their wrists collapse inward, which twists the forearm and puts extra torque through the elbow with every rep.

Try a slightly wider or more neutral hand position on the bars and see if the pain location shifts or eases. Small tweaks here matter more than people expect.

Overworked triceps and tight forearms

Dips hammer the triceps hard, especially near lockout. If your triceps and forearms are chronically tight from other pressing work, that tightness pulls on the tendons that cross the elbow, and dips just tip it over into pain.

A few minutes of stretching after training won't fix bad form, but it takes some of the tension out of the tissue so the joint isn't dealing with a constant pull.

Swapping in some easier options for a while

If the pain is real but mild, you don't have to cut dips out completely. Bench dips let you control the range more easily since your feet stay on the ground, and diamond push-ups hit the triceps hard without putting the elbow into that deep, loaded stretch position.

Overhead triceps extension with a light dumbbell is another way to keep training the muscle while you figure out what's aggravating the joint. Ease back in slowly once things settle rather than jumping straight back to your old volume.

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