Weighted Ring Push Ups

That is exactly why this version needs a bench. If you lie flat on the ground with a belt on, the plate lands and carries its own weight, so you are loading nothing. Putting your feet on a bench and your hands in the rings lifts your whole body clear of the floor, so the plate hangs free underneath you. Set the rings noticeably higher than the bench, roughly hip height and around twice the bench height, so your torso and the belt sit high enough for the plate to swing without touching down. Pull the belt tight so the chain stays short, and use two or three smaller plates rather than one large one. If the plate touches the floor at the bottom of a rep, you are quietly losing depth.

Both work, they just have different ceilings. A vest is simpler because nothing hangs beneath you, so you do not need the bench at all. The limit is load. You can usually go up to around 20 kg with a weight vest, and once you want to go heavier than that a dip belt is the way to do it. A belt also lets you make small jumps in load by swapping plates, so you can add a little at a time instead of waiting until you can handle the next big step.

Three things move it. A loose belt migrates straight away, so pull it as tight as you can before the plate goes on. Standing upright with the weight attached lets gravity walk it down to your hips, which is why you keep the weight in front of you and stay as horizontal as possible while you step onto the bench. And the belt slides when the plank shape goes, so if your hips sag or pike mid set the belt follows them. Keeping it high right under the chest is not only about comfort. The closer the load sits to your hands, the more of every kilo actually reaches your chest instead of hanging on your spine.

Get good at both halves separately first. That means clean, controlled ring push ups with no weight at all, where the rings stay steady under your hands and the last rep looks like the first. It also means weighted push ups on a stable surface, so the belt is not new to you either. There is no magic rep count or floor push up number that unlocks this, whatever you read elsewhere. If your ring push ups still wobble, or your depth changes from rep to rep, hanging a plate on you will only make both worse.

They are not really competing for the same job. Rings let your hands rotate and travel inwards at the top, so the chest works through bringing your arms together as well as pressing, and the stabilisers around the shoulder are working the whole time. A stable surface does the opposite. It takes the balancing away, which lets you handle more absolute load and push closer to failure, because your stabilisers are not the thing that quits first. If size is the goal, use both. Rings for control and range, bars or parallettes when you want to grind out the heavy sets.

Your maximum strength goes up, but do not be surprised if your floor push up rep count dips at first. That is a common report after switching, because low rep loaded work builds a different quality from high rep bodyweight endurance. If your floor number matters to you, keep training it alongside this rather than replacing it.