Trap Exercises Ranked (BEST TO WORST!)

There are so many trap exercises, but which ones should you be focusing your efforts on if you want to build bigger traps and increase your strength? In this video, I’m going to give you the most popular trap exercises ranked from worst to best and help you to determine which you should be doing and

[Heavy metal music playing]  Yeah, no, don t keep rolling. What’s up guys, Jeff Cavaliere, athleanx. com. What you see behind me is a bunch of different trap exercises, many of which you either do right  now or you’re going to want to start doing by the time this video is over. And I’m going to make  your job a lot easier, because I’m going to show you the ones you should focus on by ranking  them from the worst all the way up to the best, so that you know which ones you should invest your  time in to get the gains that you’re after.

Now, as always, it’s important to understand  the criteria for which these exercises are going to be judged on. Because they all, first  and foremost, have to be able to build muscle. And before you think, yeah, here. Well not  really, that’s just part of the traps. We want them to be able to build here, here and here  because that is the entire trap muscle.

And it’s possible with the right exercise selection  to cover all your bases. That being said, all the exercises on this list always have to  be safe exercise choices. As you’ll see here at the bottom of the list, some not so much. And we kick it all off at the bottom of the barrel as I break out my red marker to cover  the first of the Worst exercises. And can we just get this one out of the way?

Can we  talk about the Upright Row? Now, look, I understand you might point me towards a video  that you got click baited into thinking you were going to find the reason why the Upright Row was  actually good. Only to have the person essentially backtrack with all the same reasons why I’ve been  saying they’re not so good for all these years. Guys, there’s a better alternative to the  Upright Row. Sure, they can hit the traps, but at what expense?

When you raise your  shoulders up and then drive them down with additional weight into internal rotation,  you’re recreating one of the physical therapist tools for provoking pain and testing for  impingement. I’ll pass. So, for me, guys, I’ll put the big red X first and foremost through  the upright row and the Worst of the Worst. Moving on, I get to stick with my red marker as  we stick in the Worst of the Worst category. This time for a Shrug, but not any Shrug.

This Shrug,  the Rolling Shrug. I m not sure who invented this, but it does no extra benefit for you, and it  does a whole lot of detrimental things. The bottom line is, when you allow your shoulders  to round forward, you do two things to that glenohumeral joint. One, you’re bringing it into  internal rotation, which again will start to cause some of that stress onto the anterior shoulder  capsule. The second thing is you’re adding a compressive force to that joint that has an  effect on the clavicle or collarbone.

As the collarbone sits down onto something called  the thoracic outlet, you can get some of the symptoms of Thoracic Outlet Syndrome, which can  lead to numbness or tingling or vascular issues in your arm. And the rolling component isn’t  helping you at all anyway, because the real main function of the upper traps is simply going  to be lift up and down. So, what I do here with the Rolling Shrugs is just roll right on past  them to better exercises that lie ahead. I stick with my red marker one more time as we  finish up the Worst of the Worst, this time with the Above the Knee Rack Pole. And once again, this  exercise is causing a lot of the same issues that I just had with the Rolling Shrug.

When you have  that much weight in your hand held out in front of your body, it sends those shoulders into that  protracted state and causes that compression, also traction down the arm that can create some  of those thoracic outlet issues. That being said, there is some light at the end of the tunnel. There is a version of the Rack Pull that you could do coming up later on. That’s going to rank  higher because it alleviates a lot of those issues that I have. But for now, let’s suffice it to  say that it also gets a big red X and belongs in the Worst of the Worst category.

And so, with that, I now get to break out my blue marker as we work our way up into  the Better category. All good trap exercises, but still some limitations that are holding them  back from being up at the top with the best. That being said, I want to start with the Incline Y  Raise and most of the exercises in this category are more corrective in nature. In other words,  not the biggest muscle builders, but doing an all-important job of hitting different areas of  the traps that you’re not used to hitting. And with the Incline Y Raise, we’re getting the lower  traps very effectively.

A lot of people out there don’t even train their lower traps or even know,  again, as I mentioned in the beginning, that they even exist. But you can train them really well  with this exercise and very, very light weights. The key to lower trap development is that whenever  you perform any overhead weighted exercise, even like an Overhead Shoulder Press, you’re  going to provide more stability for the scapula, giving you safer biomechanics on the exercise. The  bottom line is bigger weights don’t always equal bigger traps. Especially when those overlooked  areas just aren’t getting hit often enough.

And that’s why the Incline Y Raise gets the  first blue circle in the Better category. Next up is an exercise that you would think would  be at the top of every one of my lists. Hell, I would even try to find a way to do it as a  leg exercise. We’re talking about Face Pulls, but not so fast, because the Face Pull does a  really good job of hitting some of the traps, but not everywhere. You see, there’s no elevation  going on here, so the upper traps are not really in focus, and the lower traps here are not  really doing much of anything either.

But we do know that this is a good middle trap exercise,  as well as obviously hitting the rhomboids and the rear delts, and it’s just a great exercise  for building up the overall health of your shoulder. It belongs in the Better category,  but we’ll make it better, just stick around. Next up is another one of those small  exercises that pays big dividends if you start to incorporate it into your programing. And  again, this is another one of those corrective exercises that actually plays an important part  in all my Athlean-X programs. It’s called an Urlacher.

And what’s nice about this exercise is  it’s also incorporating some rotator cuff into the already existing upper trap and middle  trap work that it’s accomplishing. Again, this is not an exercise that you’re getting your  benefits from the amount of weight you’re using, but more so from developing that synchronization  between the components of the exercise, moving smoothly through elevation and retraction  and external rotation as you bring the dumbbells up to the top. Again, good shoulder biomechanics  rely on you having good segmental ability to control all portions of the shoulder movement as  your arm moves through space. Remember, it’s a three-dimensional joint with a lot of available  movement. If you don’t get it right, you can be asking for some issues down the road.

So why not  invest just a little bit of extra time into good shoulder exercises? The Urlacher is one that’s  also going to help you to develop your traps. This next exercise in the Better category  is an interesting one, because it introduces a different function of the traps that  you might not be leaning into right now, and we call it the Trap Pulldown. And we lean into  the shoulder stabilizing action of the upper traps during traditional pulldown. See, what you do  here is you take a much narrower