The last time I did a go round with dips I injured my shoulder, but I was doing dips with chairs angled at a V. The other week I was outside watching some students make a catch all with salvage covers and I decided to try some dips between two recycling bins. They felt good. I've been trying to find a shoulder friendly exercise I could do that would hit the outer and lower pectoral. Doing them with a medium width, and hands parallel. seemed to be fairly safe. I also kept my chin tucked down which seems to hit the chest better.

Push-ups are a lot like bench presses. If you just do them from one angle, you tend to overbuild the middle chest. I've been doing them from different heights and and different widths for awhile now, but that outer and lower chest tightening seemed to elude me. I think the medium width dips done parallel may be what I want.

I've had an interesting history with dips. When I was young I did them a lot. As I got into weight training I was able to bench press 300 pounds by using weighted dips as an auxillary exercise; eventually working up to 90 pounds strapped around my waist. You can always do more reps and use weight when you have stable and sturdy dip bars to catch your weight. Since I am doing dips twice a week between two chair, I am being very careful not to over do it and I am not using weights.

Basically I don't try to race the reps. I am careful to lower and raise under control and I don't use any slights to get up. On the plus side it builds strength from a different plane of motion and besides the chest, lats, triceps and shoulders, they help build the center trapezius. So so far so good. My basic chest workout is three sets of feet elevated push-ups supersetted with pull-ups and three sets of dips supersetted with chins.