How to Build Big Traps at Home

How to Build Big Traps at Home

Today we are going to talk about how to build big traps at home. Our traps are a lot more than just the muscle we see when we look in the mirror that runs between our shoulders and neck. And it takes more than just shrugs to properly develop them.

The traps or trapezius muscle take up a lot of our upper back real estate starting at the back of our skull and going all the way down to the mid-back. Properly developing this muscle will contribute a lot to our upper body size and not only that, but it will improve our posture and make us stronger in virtually every upper body lift.

The traps get broken into 3 different parts the upper, middle and lower each one responsible for a slightly different movement. The upper traps are responsible for elevating or upward rotation of the shoulder blades and this is the portion of the traps that are developed with dumbbell shrugs.

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Something we should keep in mind here is that the shrug has a very short range of motion, limiting the amount of time under tension. Which is an important element in muscle growth. We can increase this time by having a brief isometric hold for a couple of seconds in the top position and then taking a moment to feel the stretch at the bottom before repeating the next rep.

If you are using bands you can add to the effectiveness of doing a shrug by anchoring the band low and off to the side. When you shrug this way the resistance is more in line with the muscle fibres making the exercise that much more effective.

When this exercise is done with a cable machine it’s called it a voyeur shrug and I have absolutely no idea why it’s called it by that name.

The mid traps are responsible for pulling our shoulder blades back and together and to work this portion of our traps I like Incline dumbbell shrugs.

Whenever we are working our mid traps are Rhomboids (raamboydz) are also involved. For the incline shrug you set your bench a 30 to 45-degree angle and while you lift your shoulders up and back what you really want to concentrate on is pulling your shoulder blades together and then I like to pull them down to activate the lower traps as well.

If your using bands attach them to something about chest height or slightly higher. The lower you set them up the more you’ll engage the upper traps and the higher you place the anchor point the more the lower trap is involved.

Make sure your far enough away from the anchor that when your shoulders are forward you feel a bit of a stretch then pull your shoulders back with your shoulder blades coming together. Once you have your shoulder blades back as far as you can drop them down just like you would to set them for a big lift like the bench press.

Something worth mentioning here is you are always pulling with your trapezius muscle, not your arms. So your arms should be straight throughout the movement.

The main movement that the lower traps does is to pull the shoulder blades down. So to focus on this part of the muscle I like to start with a dead hang on a pull-up bar then pull my shoulders back and down. Engaging both the middle and lower portions of the muscle. You can do this by itself for reps or you can do this movement in between each rep of either a chin-up or a pull-up. Again this can be duplicated with bands keeping the anchor point high, but nothing feels as good as doing it on a pull-up bar.

While the trapezius is one of the largest muscles on your back it isn’t the largest. To build the largest muscle on your back, your lats, Watch this video next. So we can keep working out while having fun.