What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, Athlean-X.com.
A little up close and personal today because we're going to get into our traps.
I'm going to show you how to start getting these muscles to start standing up a little
bit more by first understanding how they sit in your body in the first place.
You see, when you look at your traps they're a muscle – they're a really big muscle – and
they're actually attached all the way here at the back of my head and they go down into
my spine.
It attaches to my spine, but they come around the back here.
You can see as they come around here as I stretch, all the way down here.
This is this muscle, all the way to the front here at the acromion, the outer third of the
clavicle.
So this bone here in our body, they're wrapping around.
They're a big, meaty area here that you have to consider.
But what do we do when we train our traps?
We do this.
We go straight up and down, right?
That's not necessarily the angle that the muscle sits at.
If you really want to truly get at the angle the muscle sits at, what you want to do is
step your low cable here at an angle so my body is starting in this position here.
Now we're taking advantage of the fact that my head – the origin up here – and then
down here, the outer third of the clavicle, are separated as far as I can get.
Now what I would do is shrug from here.
Of course, we know that they can retract the scapula as well.
So what I'll do is, as I come around I would just rotate.
So I would shrug, then rotate, then pull.
Shrug here, and then rotate and pull back.
So in one motion it just looks like that.
I get a little bit of a half-turn, quarter turn of my body.
Okay, so you can see it from here.
It's like this, roll, and turn.
Next thing you want to understand is, you want to make sure that you're working the
lower traps and the mid traps as well because they will help to stabilize the scapula on
your rib cage and then also help to prevent shoulder issues.
You could do that by raising a 25lb plate up and over your body.
All the way up to the top and then down, and then all the way up.
Now, people do this in this fashion.
They take it all the way down and all the way up.
The thing is, your traps are really kicking in from this point up, okay?
From here up, you're working mostly front delt.
We know that the front delts are really going to kick in and work on that first part.
You don’t have to do that.
You can take an inclined bench like this and then take your 25lb plate here up on top,
and then just use that as the low point and basically raise from there.
So up top, down eccentrically, and up.
Then down.
Try to get as many reps as you can until failure, but go for high rep ranges here.
These muscles are built for endurance and when we train them strictly for strength we
lose out on the opportunity to expose them to the tension that they're used to getting.
You want to try to hold your shoulder blades down and back as you do this to, again, reinforce
the actions of the traps.
If you want to start getting these muscles to start popping up a little bit more, then
you have to get an understanding a little bit more about how they lay in your body to
appreciate how you really need to start training them.
Guys, we're putting the science back in strength here as we always do.
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I'll see you guys over there.
Bye.