subject: A New Trap Workout - Try It Now [print this page] So what is the best trap workout to build up your traps and make it look like you have mountain tops in between your shoulders and your neck? There are a ton of different types of trap exercises out there that you can do in order to build a thick set of traps. But first you need to understand something about the trapezius muscle. When you mention traps, beginners and intermediates immediately think that they only reside at the top of their back by their neck. This is what we normally believe are our traps and they are but there is a lot more to them. You see, your trapezius muscle runs all the way from your neck down to almost the entire length of your back. It is a huge muscle and it has many functions. Because of this, just training them blindly with regular barbell or dumbbell shrugs is not going to get you the best set of jaw dropping traps. You need to hit them with different angles, poundages, exercise, and techniques.
Now the best type of trap workouts will be anything that involves different exercises, but first and foremost some form of dead lifting exercise. These alone will add inches and pounds of muscle on your body in the shortest time frame possible. In fact, if you did nothing else, then I guarantee you can develop a set of jaw dropping, shirt splitting traps in no time with just one exercise. Thats how powerful this exercise is, plus they add slabs of beef to the back of your legs, lower back, shoulders and your entire torso. Many more people should be doing some type of dead lift in their workout routines.
The reason why dead lifts are such a great exercise for your trap workouts is because of the heavy load that you can use for the entire duration of the lift and each set. It is also a very functional exercise in the sense that you are just picking a weight up off the floor. You really cant get more functional than that in any type of real life situation. So when you begin the lift and lift the bar off the floor, your trapezius muscle and all your other upper back muscles have to isometrically contract the entire time to essentially keep your arms in place>. If these muscles did not do their job, your arms would come out of their sockets.
Now if you really dont care about adding weight to your dead lift and really want to try and focus squarely on your traps, then I would do an alternative to dead lifts and thats rack pulls. For these, you need a power rack so you can set the pins up just below knee level. From there, you would perform a regular and normal dead lift the only difference is that itll be off the floor resting on the pins when you first start. This allows you to blow past the sticking point in most dead lifts and use more weight, thus overloading the traps even more.
So a great trap workout for anyone including you would be to start off with some type of dead lifting movement. It can be rack pulls, sumo dead lifts, normal dead lifts, trap bar dead lifts or anything of that nature. I dont care and it really doesnt matter, whichever one your heart desires. My personal choice would be rack pulls because I can really pile the weight on and overload my upper back and trap muscles. So for this exercise, I would put it first in the workout and shoot for 3 sets of 5 if you are just starting out. Really push the weight and leave it all out on the gym floor for this exercise. If you can do this, then youll definitely spark some trap growth.
For the next exercise, youre going to do some form of rowing exercise. A good one in my book is face pulls where you pull the rope cable attachment towards your chin, squeezing your upper back muscles, the posterior deltoids and your traps hard on every peak contraction. For this exercise you really want to focus on the peak contraction so you will need to go a little lighter. Shoot for 4 sets of 12 reps on this one.
The next exercise you are going to do is the 1-arm dumbbell shrug. The reason why I like this type of shrugging exercise over others is because doing them with one arm allows you to get more range of motion throughout the entire movement. And the more range of motion you have, the better you can recruit muscle fibers which equals more hypertrophy for you. Shoot for 4 sets of 10 reps on each side with a peak contraction of 2 seconds at the top of each rep.
The last exercise that youre going to perform is hiss shrugs using the standing calf machine or squat machine. Its really simple to in that all you do is set yourself up in the machine like you were about to do a squat or a calf raise and let the pads rest on your shoulders. From there, keeping your legs straight, not bending them at all, shrug your shoulders up as high as you can make them go. Make believe you want to touch your shoulders to your ears. Hold the peak contraction for 2 seconds and bring them back down. Go for 4 sets of 12 reps on this exercise.
So as you can see, the best trap workouts always have a multiple of exercises in them with different rep ranges and various movements and angles. The trapezius muscle is a giant muscle that runs all across your back and up towards your neck. The more variations you can use plus adding in dead lifts somewhere in there, the more results you will achieve.
