What's up guys! Michael Kamalu here aka Dr Gains and in this video I'm going to show you several
science-based techniques to hit and grow your upper traps much more efficiently and effectively
than you ever have before. If you've seen the movie "Warrior" we're talking Tommy level traps
here. Most people, to work their upper traps, just grab some weight and then shrug up. You'll see
in this video why that is far from reaching the max potential of the upper trapezius and you're
leaving a lot of gains on the table. Now, we're going to dive right in and I'll demonstrate those
techniques and work out here but first, really quickly, let's make sure we're on the same page
as to what the upper traps actually are and, by the way, in this and all of my videos I include
timestamps in the description below the video with key parts of the video in case you want
to come back and review specific sections or say you're already an anatomy expert and want to skip
right to a particular technique in the workout. The word "traps" is short for "trapezius" and
the trapezius is one of the largest muscles in the body. It has origination points that start
all the way up at the base of the skull and don't stop until down in your lower
back. Because it's so large and the origination and insertion points cover such a large area,
it's split up anatomically and functionally into three different parts. There is the lower traps
also called the Ascending trapezius. There's the middle or Transverse trapezius and then the upper
or Descending trapezius. In this video we're only going to be going over the upper traps,
the top portion. It might be my favorite back muscle and it's also the only back muscle that you
can see both from the front and from behind the body unless you happen to have massive lats. Now,
we'll do a deeper dive into the anatomy later on but first, let's see those techniques in action.
All right guys so the traps, probably more than any other muscle in the body,
is where the wrist straps come in handy because the traps are an extremely powerful muscle.
I use the entire cable stack with these and your forearms simply can't keep up. They're going to
give out way before your traps do and you're not going to be able to get good work on them.
There are some advantages to doing one arm at a time that a lot of people don't realize. Because
the traps originate up here, on your neck, some of the fibers do, you want to rotate your neck to
the opposite side when you are depressing your shoulder. That way you're getting a completely
full extension of the trap muscle and then as you shrug your shoulder up you can bring your neck
to the same side so that you can get a full contraction of the trap muscle. That's simply
impossible to do if you're doing both arms at the same time. It's important to note that you're not
going to start the rep from a neutral position. You're going to depress your shoulder first,
try to angle your neck away, and then shrug up and bring your neck towards.
The angled cable trap shrugs are extremely important to use in your routine because
the fibers of the trapezius are situated such that you cannot work the whole thing simply by
going straight up, which is how most people work their traps. You actually have to pull at an angle
in order to hit the traps fully. We are actually going to use two different stances to make sure
that we manipulate that 90-degree rule and hit the trap as best we can. So, first angle, we are going
to be crossing the front of our body with our arm, depressing our shoulder and pulling back.
Press and back. Make sure you're using as much of a shrugging motion as possible.
Then we're going to rotate our body so that our arm
is out, away from our body, and do the same thing pull in at an angle as we shrug.
Now, a big difference between this trap isolation and the upper back motion that we were using
is, we are not bending our elbow at all
we are keeping a locked elbow and only doing a shrug motion to get the weight up. Up and back.
Another way to do the angle trap is with a pause at the top of the shrug,
where you get a rotated motion as well. So the way you would do that is
shrug up first and then rotate back. We can do that because we're at an
angle so the rotating back is actually against resistance. So up and back.
Up.
With the one-arm dumbbell trap shrugs what you want to do is support yourself on something,
because you're usually going to use fairly heavy weights when you're working your traps
and you don't want to be unbalanced. Also, when you have something like this you can lean,
and that's advantageous because with the traps, we not only want to shrug up, we actually want
to shrug in as well. With the cable we can manipulate that resistance by stepping away
but with the dumbbells, it's a little harder because resistance is always down. But by leaning
you see my body position now, if i shrug up, it's actually coming up and in as well.
So, grab your weight, support yourself, get a slight lean,
and then press your shoulder and shrug up. Now, you also want to try and tilt your neck away from
the weight as it goes down and towards the weight as it goes up because of the origination points
of the trapezius that helps you get a better extension and contraction.
All right, now, let's take a closer look at the anatomy and the science behind why those
techniques are so effective. When you're trying to figure out how to work any muscle, you have to
look at the origination and insertion points and the direction that those fibers are traveling.
As i referenced in the workout, many of the upper trap fibers originate along the neck, specifically
the cervical vertebrae, and then they travel down and insert on the lateral end of the clavicle,
also called your collarbone and the lateral end of the scapula. It's called the acromion,
this bony part at the very edge of your shoulder. So, if you want to hit a muscle to its fullest
extent and potential you have to hit it from full extension to maximum contraction. Now,
you don't always need to do that in the same lift but you do want to be able to hit the entire range
at some point or another. So, if we want to work the maximum extension side of the muscle then we
got to get these insertion points as far away from the origination points as possible. That's why,
in the first technique in the video, you not only need to drop or depress the shoulder of the side
that you're working, but if you tilt your head and neck to the opposite side, you will get full
extension. You can see this is true right now, whatever you're doing, go ahead and drop
your shoulder. Drop your left or right shoulder and then tilt your head to the opposite side
and you will feel that stretch in the upper traps, and not only will you feel it, but you'll feel how
big of a difference that makes, just dropping your shoulder versus dropping it and turning your head.
It's a huge difference. Then, to achieve maximum contraction, you do the opposite. You need to get
that insertion point as close to the origination points as possible so not only do you need to
shrug your shoulder up as far as it will go, but you need to tilt your head and neck down to meet
it. That is how you will get maximum contraction of the upper lats. So you see why it's important
to work your trapezius unilaterally or one arm at a time because you can't do that if you're trying
to work both sides at the same time. In the second technique, I told you that you need to bring your
arm up at an angle rather than straight up. We can see why that's the case by looking at the anatomy.
A lot of the fibers do come straight down from the neck to the shoulder, and so they're going
to pull straight up, but most of the fibers are at an angle. They come down and across simultaneously
before they insert and some of them are almost completely horizontal. They don't just want to
bring your shoulder up, they want to bring it back and in towards the center of your body.
So if you're only shrugging straight up you are not working those fibers to their maximum
potential. In the workout video i showed you three different techniques or variations for
hitting the upper trap fibers at an angle and I want to touch briefly on what the differences
are between them and the various benefits that you'll get with each. The first was with your arm
at an angle across the front of your body so this variation targets the maximum extension side of
the upper trap motion. I told you earlier that, if you depress your shoulder and tilt
your head the opposite direction, you're getting maximum extension. That's not completely true,
there is a way to get an additional extension. If you bring your arm across your body,
because the fibers wrap around the back of your shoulder, you're actually extending them,
even more, when you bring your arm across your body. If you really wanted to get next level,
if you tilt your head forward as well as to the side, that is where you would get max contraction.
But, don't want to complicate it too much so getting your arm across your body
will get really all of the extension that you need and then when you shrug your shoulder back up it's
pulling those fibers at that angle. The descending and horizontal angle that you want. The second
variation was with your arm out to your side and then pulling in and up. That position targets more
towards the max contraction side of the motion and just hits them at a different angle. In this as
well as all exercises you want to be able to hit the muscles in as many different angles, planes,
motions, weight combinations as possible. So with that in mind, the third variation is somewhat of
a hybrid between the first two when it comes to the angles but, more importantly,
it adds a different variation factor in that contraction that pause in the contraction
at the top before you rotate your body. There are benefits that you get in weight lifting by
holding a sustained contraction for an extended period of time that you don't get when you're
just contracting and then immediately releasing or extending the muscle. That's particularly true
with the traps. I'll have to do a video on that sustained contraction in the future but trust
me on this one for now. Then, with the final variation, I get lots of requests to include
free weight alternatives to the exercises that use a cable but even if you do have a cable machine
you want to regularly integrate free weight exercises in with your routines. There are
several advantages that you get with free weights that don't come with cables, just like vice versa,
and one of the big advantages to free weights is they force the muscles around the target muscles
to stabilize your body more because there's not a tether holding the resistance in a specific
place. That's why dumbbell bench presses are significantly better for you than barbell benches,
which i'll also do a video on in the future. The downside to free weights is that you can't change
the angle of resistance. It's always down. So you have to actually change the position
of your body relative to the resistance rather than changing the resistance itself. By that,
see for example what we did in this exercise, we lean our body out to the side and what that does
is it makes it so that instead of gravity's resistance coming straight down your body,
it's coming at you at an angle which happens to be the angle that the majority of those
upper trap fibers lie. By leaning, when you shrug, you're not only shrugging up but you're shrugging
in relative to the resistance and to your body. If you tried to do that angled shrug in motion,
just standing up straight, you wouldn't get the benefit because there's no horizontal or angled
resistance. Moving the weight from here to here is not meeting any resistance. Gravity is always down
so the lean fixes that issue and, just like with the cables, you want to depress your shoulder and
angle your neck opposite the weight at the full extension portion and then bring your neck in,
shrug your shoulder all the way up for max contraction. In my full online programs,
I always include freeway alternatives for all the exercises that use cables and cable alternatives
for all the exercises that require free weights so that everyone no matter what equipment you
do have access to can get the full benefit and value out of those programs. And guys,
if you think these youtube videos are valuable, they barely scratch the surface of what are in
my programs. Just like there's science behind the anatomy and biomechanics of weightlifting,
there's science behind how many reps and how many sets you should do of each exercise.
How much weight you should use, the order that you should do those sets and reps in. There's science
behind what exercises you should superset with each other, what warm-ups should be done before
specific exercises and how many times in a week you should hit each muscle. There are dozens of
slight form modifications and techniques you can apply to each exercise if you have
a history of injury in that area or you have specific goals that you're trying to hit or
prevent future injury while still maximizing your gains. All of that and much more are included
in my full online programs and, right now, I'm in the middle of a beta launch for my shoulder
programs. If you think you'd be a good fit as a beta tester or would like more information,
there are links in the video description below. Guys, if you thought this video was valuable,
I'd really appreciate you giving a like or a comment, making sure you're subscribed
since all of those things will really help others to find my channel. You won't want to miss my
future content. If you have specific suggestions or requests on the content you would like me to
produce, I have a feedback form in the video description you can use or simply put your
request in the comments below. Mahalo for your support my friends, until next time!