Two of the most effective bodyweight exercises for building your upper body are pushups and dips. With pushups, your toes touch the floor and act as a pivot point for your arms to lift your upper body; with dips, your arms support your entire body weight and your feet never touch the ground. There is a lot of debate about which is better and even which is safer. But you can accomplish the same goals with either one --- only the methods are different.
Equipment Requirements
With dips, equipment is an issue; you need either parallel bars or a special dip rack. Some people have done dips using the backs of two chairs, but this can be dangerous if the chairs move during your workout. You can also do modified dips using two benches by placing your hands on one and your feet on the other, making this dip more of a backwards pushup. Of course, regular pushups require no equipment.
Muscular Focus
You will sometimes hear that dips are a better workout than dips, but this is not completely true. Dips do work the triceps, shoulders and chest muscles all at once, while you must do different types of pushups to achieve the same goals --- narrow hand positions to work the triceps, wide hand positions for the chest and inclined pushups for the lower chest. But pushups actually work more muscles than dips do. You work the core muscles of the torso and the muscles in the hips and legs if you do pushups with proper form.
Load Adjustability
It is much easier to adjust how much of your weight you lift with pushups than with dips. Modified dips using two benches allow you to lift less weight than regular dips, which use your full weight, but this is the only adjustment you can make unless you use an expensive dip machine at a gym. You can adjust pushups in so many ways --- altering hand positions, using inclined and declined positions, as well as doing them on your feet or knees, and even bending your waist or arms during the pushup --- that you can lift as much or as little of your bodyweight as you desire.
Range of Motion
While dips are more strenuous --- you will never be able to do as many dips as pushups --- the range of motion is not necessarily greater than that of a pushup. If you bend your elbows to a 90-degree angle, which is proper form with either exercise, the range of motion is roughly equal. The difference is that the dip stretches the arm behind you, while most pushups keep your elbows in front of you. Some forms of incline pushups allow a greater range of motion similar to dips.
Variety and Spontaneity
Dips can give you a hard workout fast, but they are always done the same way and typically at the same location because of the equipment. It is easier to get bored, and workouts can get stale. But you will never get bored with pushups --- the vast variety of positions and alterations you can make means you can change your workout from day to day, and you can do them anywhere or anytime you want. Both exercises have their place, but the "freshness" pushups can bring may make the difference in whether you stick to a program or not.
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