Filling Out Your Shoulders – part 2 of 4

Last week we talked about “what are the shoulder muscles” and started on trapezius muscle exercises.  If you haven’t read that yet, please do so first.  We focused on deadlifts and cleans.  For 90% of you, those two exercises are all you need for decent traps.  But for completeness, and before we move on the deltoid exercises, let’s finish out the trap exercises…

Standing Rows

Disclaimer – many weight training experts no longer advise the upright/standing row because done the traditional way, you can hurt your shoulder.  However, a slight modification is all you need to make this much safer.  See step 3 below.  To follow along with pictures, go to our standing row exercise page.   But note the change I recommend in step 3 below is not shown in the pictures.

1. Begin your upright rows by taking a straight bar with the proper amount of weight. Many gyms will provide bars with the weight permanently attached, but any straight bar with the correct amount of weight will work fine, including the Olympic bars used for the bench press.
2. Take an overgrip on the bar with your knuckles facing away from you and your hands about 3-6 inches apart. If you’re not sure where to put your hands, you can simply extend your thumbs along the bar and place your hands close enough so that the tips of the thumbs are touching. I generally find that this close grip works the traps more than a wider grip but a wider grip puts less stress on the shoulder joint.  You’ll have to find what works best for you.
3. Bend your knees and lean forward a bit, maybe 5 or 10 degrees, without hunching.  And make sure your shoulders stay pulled back.  Why?  These slight changes help to prevent shoulder injuries.
4. Move both of your arms upward and pull the weight just in front of your upper body until it stops at the point just below your chin.
5. As you pull the weight upward, be sure that your elbows stay higher than your hands throughout the movement.
6. Pause for a fraction of a second at the top, then slowly reverse the motion.
7. Generally, you want to go for a 1-second up, 2-seconds down approach.  The slower “down” movement (also called a “negative”) will really create a burn!
8. Repeat.
9. Don’t cheat – it’s tempting to thrust with your legs to get extra momentum or to arch your back, etc. to get out a last repetition, but don’t.  At an advanced level, there are certain forms of “cheating” like this that can be beneficial, but not until you’ve been consistently training for at least a year.
10. For your last rep, even if you can’t get it up to your chin, go as high as you can, hold it for 3 seconds, and then lower it as slowly as possible (like 6 to 10 seconds).

Shrugs

Unless you have pathetically small traps, or are moving to advanced bodybuilding, you can probably skip shrugs.  They are essentially an isolation exercise and really not needed for a basic muscle and strength program.  But I am including them not because they are isolation but because you can handle huge weight with this exercise and I believe it is important for strength and lean mass to get used to very heavy weights. These are generally very safe even if you’ve really loaded the bar!

Shrugs can be done with a barbell or dumbbells.  For some pictures and extra tips, see our exercise page on shoulder shrugs.

1. If possible, place an Olympic barbell on a rack mount with the height settings to be just an inch or two lower than where your fingertips normally hang.  This will let you start the exercise without injury when you are doing high weights.
2. Place the proper amount of weight on the bar and take an overgrip with your hands approximately shoulder width apart.
3. Stand erect with the bar and weight in your hands so that you are holding the bar just in front of your thighs.
4. You should begin this exercise with your shoulders hanging down and slightly forward.
5. Pull your shoulders upward and backward as much as possible and hold that position for a second or two.
6. Keep your head looking straight ahead.
7. Relax your traps to lower each shoulder back downward to the original starting position.
8. Repeat.

A variation I like is to alternate sets with the bar in front, as described above, and then with the bar behind you, essentially against your butt.

This exercise can also be performed using dumbbells. Take a heavy weight in each hand and hold each dumbbell at the side of your body or just slightly to the front. Each palm should be facing inward toward your body.  Then the motion is the same.

One final note on shrugs – you’ll quickly start doing very heavy weight with these – that’s good!  But you may have trouble keeping a grip on the bar (your grip fails before your traps do).  Try to avoid starting to use wrist weight straps – you need your grip to get used to the higher weight.  Potentially, on the last set, if you want to use straps that’s fine but we generally want to train more muscles with each exercise and if you are doing shrugs last, your traps are already probably pretty tired by now and your grip should suffice.

Summarizing The Traps Exercises

So to refresh, the 4 exercises are

1. deadlifts
2. cleans
3. standing rows
4. shrugs

Caution – some people can overdevelop their traps (of course, that’s a matter of opinion).  Check out the guy to the right – his traps are a little too large in proportion to the rest of his upper body.

If you are a beginner, don’t move down this list until you’ve mastered the exercise before it. In other words, you need to be doing deadlifts, with proper form, light weight, progressively adding, etc. for several weeks (maybe even a couple months) before adding cleans to your routine.  And then, after several weeks of cleans, maybe you can add upright rows.  And only after several weeks of that should you add shrugs (and an argument could be made that you don’t need to move to shrugs unless you have really unbalanced traps and/or are moving to advanced bodybuilding).

Next week:  starting on the deltoids!

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Related posts:

1. Filling Out Your Shoulders – Part 1 of 4
2. Filling Out Your Shoulders – Part 4 of 4
3. Filling Out Your Shoulders – Part 3 of 4

Tags: rows, traps