Trapezius muscle, or commonly known as traps, is the muscle between your neck and shoulders. Traps are important for boxers and baseball players, where throwing motion is required.
- Grab a pair of dumbbells. Palms facing each other. Let the dumbbells hang at your sides. Your arms are fully extended. Your legs should be closed so that your thighs do not block the weights from moving.
- Bend your knees slightly. Look straight into the mirror.
- Back straight. Do not lean forward or backward.
- Without bending your elbows, shrug your shoulders straight up as high as possible, towards your ears. The motion is like you are saying “I don’t know”.
- Pause for a second at the top.
- Lower your dumbbells straight back slowly to the original position.
- Do 3 sets, 8 to 12 repetitions each set.
- As you can see, quite a straightforward movement, up and down, vertically. Do not roll your shoulders forwards or backwards at the top. Doing such movement do nothing good, in fact, may be dangerous to your shoulders. Elevating your shoulders straight up and down and let the gravity does the work. As simple as that.
- You can do this shoulder shrug with barbell. However, I do not recommend barbell shoulder shrug. People tend to rotate to hold the bar, which is bad for the shoulders.
- To get a much higher movement is to do alternate dumbbell shrug. In other words, lift dumbbell at a time.
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