When your time is limited, staring yourself in the eye doing shrugs in the mirror may not be a top priority – but training your traps muscle is not only important for building a big back, it’s essential for increasing strength across your compound lifts and improving poor posture.
They might not have the commanding presence of the lats, or the same fame as the rear delts, but if you want a big, shapely back that fills your muscle fit shirt, then you might want to consider giving some more time to trap exercises. Yes, we’re talking about shrugs, but that’s not the only traps exercise to make your upper back pop.
So if you’re wondering how to grow your traps and build your own trap workouts, then you’re in luck. We’re going to share our best trap exercises to strengthen, shape, and sculpt your traps muscles. Add these to your back workout or give them a go on shoulder day – they’re guaranteed to give you a solid-looking upper body that shows you’ve put in work at the gym.
Ready to get training? Head to the Gymshark Training App to access hundreds of back-building workouts, or add the exercises below to build your own session and track your sets, reps, and weights as you go!
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What Are Traps Muscles & Where Are They Located?
Traps refer to the 'Trapezius' muscle that extends from the base of your neck, across your shoulders, and down to the middle of your back [1]. It's a superficial muscle that makes up a large area of your upper back – making it easy to notice those all-important gains (especially if you’re wearing a halterneck sports bra or working out in a tank top).
The traps are divided into three key areas:
Upper Trapezius
Middle Trapezius
Lower Trapezius
Together, these form the trapezius muscle, assisting with neck, head, shoulder, and torso movements along with stabilizing the spine and maintaining proper posture.
How Do You Target The Traps?
Training your back alone will help strengthen and grow your traps, but depending on your goals, this might not be enough to develop the traps if you’re looking for real size and shape.
To grow your trapezius muscle, it's important to target the muscles with exercises that allow a full range of motion, such as shrugs, along with isometric exercises where the traps are stabilizing, such as the deadlift.
Whilst you could perform a dedicated traps workout, trap exercises are usually incorporated into back day, alongside movements such as the barbell row. However, depending on your training split, combining shoulders and traps is another great way to go when it comes to trap workouts, and it may give you a little more time to focus specifically on your traps.
If you’re wondering how to program your trap workouts then stick with us as we cover the best trap exercises to build big traps.
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The Best Trap Exercises To Build Big Traps
Shrugs may be the OG of traps exercises – but they aren’t the only option for creating big traps.
We've put together a list of the best trap exercises to include in your trap workouts:
Shrugs
Barbell Deadlift
Rack Pulls
Upright Rows
Face pulls
Scroll down to learn more about each traps exercise, and how to do them.
1. Shrugs
When you think of training your traps, shrugs are probably one of the first exercises that come to mind, and for good reason. Great for activating your upper and middle traps, shrugs are usually performed with dumbbells but can be done with a barbell, cables, or trap bar.
The shrug exercise is a great upper-body finisher, isolating the traps to build mass, strength, and muscular endurance.
How To Do Dumbbell Shrugs:
Select a pair of dumbbells and hold them by your side, palms facing your thighs. Stand with your feet directly below your hips, chest proud and gaze forward.
Take a breath in and engage your core. Keeping your arms long, raise your shoulders, shrugging them up towards your ears.
Pause at the top for a second, then slowly lower your shoulder back down. Repeat.
Pick an appropriate weight and aim for 3 sets of 15-20 repetitions, controlling the movement to really feel the burn.
Dumbbell Shrugs Alternative: Using a barbell places the arms in front of your body, which still activates the traps but also involves the rhomboids and spinal extensors. Many also find barbell shrugs easier to lift heavier.
2. Barbell Deadlift
If we’re talking about the best ways to build a specific muscle group, then deadlifts are on most lists, and we’re not even sorry about it.
When performed correctly, deadlifting is one of the best compound exercises out there. Whilst the traps aren't the main focus of this lift, deadlifts engage your entire back, hitting all three parts of the trapezius muscle.
Start your workout with deadlifts, end it with shrugs, and trust us, your traps will have got a serious pump from two of the best trap exercises.
How To Do Barbell Deadlifts:
Step up to the loaded barbell, positioning the bar so that it hovers over the mid to bottom laces on your does. Feet should be shoulder width, directly under hips, toes pointing forward.
Squat down, taking hold of the bar and gripping it thumb distance outside of your shins.
Keeping a neutral spine, inhale and retract your shoulders whilst engaging your lats.
Extend your legs, pushing into the ground with your feet, lifting the bar as you do so, but keeping your arms straight. As the bar becomes level with your knees, extend your torso and continue to straighten your legs until your body is fully upright.
Hold the top position for a couple of seconds as you exhale, squeezing your shoulder blades together before lowering the bar, keeping a proud chest, and ensuring the back does not round. The weight should be controlled back to the platform. Repeat.
Looking to brush up on your deadlifting form or learn about different grips you can use? Read our Ultimate Guide To Deadlifting.
Conventional Deadlift Alternative: Step your feet out into a wide stance, and you’ll have a sumo deadlift. This still targets the traps but engages the quads a lot more than the conventional deadlift shown above.
3. Rack pulls
If you don’t know what rack pulls are, they’re pretty much the top half of a deadlift, but rather than lifting the bar from the floor, you pull from the rack at roughly knee height. By concentrating on just the upper portion of the deadlift, rack pulls place a huge amount of demand on the traps muscles. Granted, they don’t give the same full body strength development as deadlifts, but this makes them one of the best exercises to build big traps.
How To Do Rack Pulls:
Set up the power rack so the support bars are just above or slightly below knee height. Position the bar on the supports and load up the weight plates to an appropriate weight. (If you don't have access to a power rack, you can set up two benches and place the bar on top, as shown above.)
Step up to the barbell, standing so your thighs are just behind it, feet directly under hips, toes facing forward.
Tilting your pelvis forward, pushing your hips back, and bending your knees slightly, take hold of the bar in a double overhand grip (or mixed grip if you prefer), ensuring you keep a neutral spine, focusing on a point on the ground directly in front of you so as not to strain your neck. Your hands should be slightly wider than shoulder width on the bar (about a thumb width outside of your thighs).
Engaging your lats by creating tension on the bar (pretend you are trying to ‘wrap’ it around your legs). Take a deep breath in to engage your core, straightening your legs by pushing into the floor with your feet. Squeeze your glutes as your hips extend, and squeeze your upper back as you pause in full extension at the top.
Lower back slowly down, controlling the movement as you push your hips back, maintaining a neutral spine as the bar returns to the rack. Repeat.
Rack Pulls Alternative: Try the snatch grip rack pull by taking a wide grip on the bar (as much as 1.5 times wider than shoulder width). This will target the traps even more, allowing for a greater range of motion to really hit those upper back muscles.
4. Upright rows
Upright rows are a great exercise to add to your traps muscle workout routine, not only to build strength and mass in your traps but to challenge your anterior and rear deltoids. The upright row is also an essential part of the clean and press, so if you're an Olympic lifter, isolating this movement may help you throw more weight above your head!
If you struggle with shoulder pain, this exercise may be one to avoid. Even if you don’t, focusing on your form is essential for these. Start light, concentrating on the muscular contraction in a higher rep range whilst you master the movement.
How To Do Upright Rows:
Load up the barbell (or EZ bar) with a light-to-moderate weight. Grip the bar in an overhead grip, shoulder width apart and hold it in front of your thighs, arms extended.
Take a breath in, bracing your core and squeezing your glutes. Driving your elbows up towards the ceiling, bending your arms to bring the bar up to your chin. Keep your shoulders and elbows pinned back.
Once your hands are above your shoulders, pause, squeezing your upper back, then slowly lower the weight back down to the starting position. Repeat.
Barbell Upright Row Alternative: You can also use a pair of dumbbells to perform upright rows. This variation promotes greater freedom of movement in the arms, decreasing the chance of shoulder impingement that comes with the fixed hand position during a barbell upright row. Using two dumbbells also encourages more symmetrical strength gains and helps to fix muscular imbalances between arms.
5. Face pulls
When it comes to building muscle, correcting posture, and promoting good overall shoulder health, Face Pulls are an excellent exercise. But did you know they are also highly effective at targeting your traps, rear delts, and rhomboids, helping to build a big back in a sculpted v-shape?
They need to be performed in a controlled motion, ensuring the muscles are loaded correctly to avoid shoulder joint issues or discomfort.
Add them in at the end of your workout for a finisher that is guaranteed to leave your traps muscles ruined… in a good way.
How To Do Face Pulls:
Attach the rope extension to the cable machine, and move the cable so it sits just above head height.
Take the ends of the cable in both hands, gripping it in an underhand grip (thumbs on the bottom of the cable, knuckles on top, palms facing up).
Take a couple of steps back, until your arms are fully extended out in front of you, feet shoulder-width apart. Lean back slightly, and engage your core.
Pull the rope towards your forehead, aiming to get the handles towards your ears, letting the elbows flair out to the side, but keeping up, in line with your wrist and hands.
Pause, squeezing your upper back, then reverse the movement, slowly extending the arms back to the starting position.
Face Pull Alternative: Don’t have access to a cable? Try resistance band face pulls instead. These are the ideal at-home face pull variation. Simply grab a long resistance band and attach it to a rig or a fixed point above head height. Then, taking hold of one end of the band in both hands, shoulder width apart, perform the same steps as above.
Try: How To Use Resistance Bands To Get The Most From Your Workouts
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FAQs
We wouldn’t say that growing your traps is easy, but using well-programmed trap workouts to train your traps hard and often will help you get there. By that we mean lifting a heavy weight, for high-volume sets, at least twice a week.
The traps respond well to high rep training, so for some sets, keep reps in the hypertrophy ranges (8-12 reps) but for other sets, take your rep range higher (20 reps+) to fully fatigue the muscle. A good way to do this can be to incorporate drop sets (training the muscle to failure by reducing the weight and completing as many reps as possible at the end of your regular sets).
Many people fixate on shrugs to train their traps, but as we’ve shown in this article there are so many other ways to hit your traps. Include a variety of exercises in your trap workouts (just as you would for any other muscle group) to continually challenge your body.
In short, yes. The traps are one of the most powerful muscles in the body so they should be able to lift fairly heavy loads, but adding load always comes second to mastering technique and performing movements safely.
How heavy you lift is going to vary depending on the exercise. For example, deadlifts and rack pulls recruit the muscles in the legs to help with shifting the load. Shrugs, on the other hand, are an isolation exercise relying on the traps, meaning you’ll have to go significantly lighter!
You’ll need to take your rep range into consideration when deciding on your weight. For trap workous, you’ll likely want to stick within the 8-12 hypertrophy rep range, and add in some higher volume training too. The weight you choose should be a weight that challenges you but allows you to complete the exercise with good form whilst moving with control.
Big traps are either down to training (whether you realize you are hitting them or not!) or genetics.
If you’ve been progressively overloading your traps and performing your traps exercises multiple times a week, then it’s not surprising your traps have grown. When we exercise, tiny microscopic tears occur in our muscle fibers. When we rest, the body repairs these by fusing together the damaged fibers, which increases the mass and size of muscles (called hypertrophy).
What if you haven’t been doing the targeted trap exercises listed above? Well, you’ve probably been hitting your traps without even realizing it! The traps are involved many in shoulder movements, so if you’ve been training your shoulders, you’ve likely been working your traps too. Even lower body exercises use the traps, for example, barbell back squats, which require the upper back to stabilize the barbell on your back.
Another reason for having big traps could be down to genetics. You might have naturally muscular traps, or you may find it easier than others to build size in your traps muscles once you start training.
You can, but we wouldn’t recommend it. For optimal gains, train your traps twice a week. Research supports this, with one study finding that training each muscle 2 or 3 times per week resulted in 3.1% greater muscle growth than training each muscle just once per week, while another found the greatest upper body gains were experienced when training each muscle two days a week [2, 3].
Uneven traps are usually due to a muscular imbalance. This isn’t uncommon – many of us have a dominant side that we use more day-to-day, and this can cause noticeable differences on either side of our traps. Single arm exercises can fix this, for example, performing single arm dumbbell shrugs on the smaller side of the body, which will build size in that side of the traps, growing the muscle it to match the other side.
Try our Best Unilateral Back Exercises For Strength & Symmetry
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Ready To Start Your Trap Workout?
We've given you our five best trap exercises for building big traps. Now it's time to head over to the Gymshark Training App and put them to the test.
If you’re seeking the signature bodybuilder aesthetic then we guarantee you won’t be disappointed. Put time in to practice these trap exercises and you’ll have a strong, shapely upper back that will have everyone in the gym looking.
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WRITTEN BY: CHRIS BECK
Chris Beck is Senior Editor at Gymshark, with a passion for curating informative conditioning and health content. Chris is an experienced Personal Trainer, and also holds qualifications in Nutrition, Sports Performance and is a certified Crossfit Level 1 Trainer.
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References:
Ourieff, J., Scheckel, B. and Agarwal, A. (2021). Anatomy, Back, Trapezius. [online] PubMed. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK518994/#:~:text=The%20trapezius%20muscle%20is%20a.
Schoenfeld, B.J., Ogborn, D. and Krieger, J.W. (2016). Effects of Resistance Training Frequency on Measures of Muscle Hypertrophy: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Sports Medicine, [online] 46(11), pp.1689–1697. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-016-0543-8.
Yue, F. (Leon), Karsten, B., Larumbe-Zabala, E., Seijo, M. and Naclerio, F. (2018). Comparison of 2 weekly-equalized volume resistance-training routines using different frequencies on body composition and performance in trained males. Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism, 43(5), pp.475–481. doi:https://doi.org/10.1139/apnm-2017-0575.
