Ultimate Upper Body Ring Exercises: 6-Exercise Chest Building Routine

📖 Read Time: 12 Minutes | 🎯 Difficulty: Intermediate to Advanced | 💪 Focus: Ring Dips & Chest

✨ If you want to master ring dips, you need to directly train the exercise. There are no other shortcuts for it.

So your workout will include mobility exercises (7 Must-know Mobility drills) and the suitable ring dip progression (Best Ring dip progressions) for your current skill level.

👊 We’ll add other exercises to supplement your ring dips training. In this article, we’re going to share with you a powerful chest-building routine that you can add after training your ring dip progression so you can master ring dips much faster!

🔎 Why Rings Are Perfect for Building Strong Chest Muscles

If you have been working on your ring dips, you should know by now the growth potential gymnastics rings can offer.

The stabilization required to even just do a support hold makes everything that you do on stable surfaces a lot harder. The difficulty increases by a huge margin that even if you have mastered dips on a stable surface, ring dips will feel like you added a ton of weight to the exercise (expect a lot of shaking when first trying the support hold).

📋 About This Workout

⚡️ Why These Particular Exercises?

We need to add volume to the primary muscles involved when doing ring dips. These are also some of the all-time favorite pushing exercises because of their general transferability to many other movement patterns. You’ll feel the chest, shoulders, and arms burning from this workout.

⚡️ What Results Will You See?

Immediate: You’ll have a hard time lifting a bar of soap in the shower due to fatigue. This is a good thing. Your muscles are stretched and held in various planes on the rings.

Over 4 weeks: Expect larger chest, tricep, and shoulder muscles which will prepare you for better ring dips and increased bent and straight-arm strength.

🔥 Ring Dip Supplement Workout

Exercise #1: Ring Supinated Push-ups

🎯 Target reps: 12

The first movement is based on regular push-ups but with hands in a supinated grip at the top position. The change of grip is the key to more chest activation. It promotes the squeeze motion at the top position which requires additional stability from your chest making the exercise perfect for developing the pecs.

Exercise #2: Archer Push-ups

🎯 Target reps: 12

Like other calisthenics fundamentals, unilateral work is a major asset to optimize muscle growth and fix muscular imbalances. Our focus is to create more muscle damage for each side so that your muscles can grow bigger and stronger. You can’t cheat your weaknesses here.

Exercise #3: Wide Arm Push-ups

🎯 Target reps: 12

Let’s further isolate the chest muscles to add more volume to our training. The wider stance emphasizes your chest and since we’re doing it on rings, you can go deeper to stretch out the chest. The instability allows added difficulty while keeping your shoulders safe.

Exercise #4: Rings “Ab Roller”

🎯 Target reps: 12

The chest, shoulders, and triceps play a major role in ring push work, but core strength is also needed for stability and global body tension. Ab rollers are one of the best core exercises you can do on rings.

The goal is to resist movement and resist the extension of your body by bracing your core. As a result, you get a stronger core which translates to stronger stability when doing dips or any other ring exercises.

Exercise #5: Crescents

🎯 Target reps: 12

Crescent flyes are an advanced fly variation that hits the chest in multiple planes because you’re not only opening your arms sideways, you’ll also move them around making a “crescent” shape with the rings. It’s basically an ab ring rollout plus chest flyes in one motion.

Exercise #6: Support Hold Forward Lean

🎯 Target hold: 12 seconds

Now we have placed emphasis on the core, triceps, and chest, it’s time to develop your anterior deltoids which are primary movers when doing ring dips. The forward lean from the support hold puts stress on the shoulders while adding tension to your straight arms.

📋 To Summarize

👍 Training ring dips is of course the priority. You can do 3 sets of 8 reps of ring dip progression that suits your skill level. After that, you can supplement your ring dip journey with this upper body chest-building routine.

You can even do the workout as a general push-development exercise to partner with a pull routine.

If you’re unsure how solid your calisthenics fundamentals are, check out the assessment below 👇 so you can set a proper starting point in your calisthenics journey.

The only way you can move forward is knowing exactly where you’ll begin. 💪

📌 Key Takeaways

• Supplement, don’t replace – Do ring dip progressions first, then this routine
• Volume is key – Limited exercises won’t optimize your muscular potential
• Ring instability = gains – Harder than stable surfaces, better muscle recruitment
• 6-exercise circuit – Complete 3 rounds, 2x per week
• Fundamentals first – Master basics before attempting this intense routine
• Balance your training – Add 2 pulling days for complete development