How to Do Better Barbell Shrugs | Form Check | Men’s Health Muscle

When we think shoulder training, we generally think of overhead presses, lateral raises, and very focused deltoid moves. But one other move guys often throw in to their shoulder training is something called the barbell stroke. Now, this is an exercise that's going to target your upper tracks, the muscles that essentially lie between your neck and your actual shoulder joint. And if you're a meathead, you know this move well because in addition to building your upper tracks, it's also a great ego stroke. It is not an exercise that everybody needs to do. And one of the questions you should ask yourself is, do you actually need to do it? Let's break all of that down and understand how to do the barbell shrug right now. Now the shrug seems simple, and in many ways it is. You're just shrugging your shoulders. In the process though, you're going to work your traps. But if done correctly, you're going to get 2 underrated things out of this exercise too. First off, you're going to challenge your forearms, especially if you're doing your shrugs without wraps or straps. The second thing that's going to happen because this is a very small range of motion and in general, we're going to wind up going very heavy with this exercise. You get to acclimate your body to a heavy load, to just holding that heavy load, and there's underrated carryover in that that's going to translate to exercises like your rack pulls and even your deadlifts. Now, is this a move that everybody needs to do? Absolutely not. And that's doubly true if you have shoulder issues because the shrugs are training a muscle that's pulling your shoulder blades upwards. That is not something that we really want to reinforce. In fact, from a longevity standpoint, we want to reinforce the exact opposite idea and pull our shoulder blades downwards into something called scapular depression. All that said, if you are dying to do this move because you really, really want to move something heavy over a small range of motion, or you really just want to grow your traps, here's how you get it done. So we've got Brett here to help us demo the barbell shrug. And he doesn't have his straps, he doesn't have his lifting belt. So we're not going to do 7 plays here. We've got one plate on each side. It's another that we can get some load on here and we can give you this real quick demo. Normally when you do this shrug too, we're going to turn towards the rack. It's generally better to do your exercises, turn towards the rack. But because we want you to be able to see Brett's upper body and we want you to be able to see most of the action that's happening in the shrug, we're going to do the shrug facing out. We are going to want to pay attention to our setup. And essentially what we're going to do is we're going to do a very, very small rack pull to get ourselves set up. So he's going to get his knees nice and close to the bar as if he was about to deadlift it. His butt is pushed back. He's essentially back ready to pick this up. He's going to do one more thing for me. He's got a shoulder with grip with his hands. He wants to think about turning the pits of his elbows forward. That's going to turn on his lats. That's a nice safe way to pick up the bar, and it's also going to set him up for success in the shrug. From there, he's going to take a deep inhale. All he's going to do then he's going to stand up and squeeze his glutes. Now he's set up for the shrug. Now we've made a point to turn the pits of our elbows forward. He's going to think about driving his pinkies. We want to think about this principle called breaking the bar, which we wind up doing on our bench presses on our deadlifts. We're going to do it on the shrug, too. So he's going to think about driving his pinkies together and essentially breaking the bar as hard as he can. From here, the shrug winds up being pretty simple, but we want to pay attention to a couple things. All Brett's going to do, he's going to shrug, shrug his shoulders up, but he doesn't want to lean forward. He wants to make sure he's standing as straight up as he can. When he's doing this. He's going to shrug up, hold for one second, and then he comes down. When he is coming down, he wants to let the weight stretch him out. The traps are not a large muscle group. They don't have a ton of range of motion, but we want to maximize that range of motion on the bottom here, Brett is going to think about squeezing his laps and driving his shoulder blades down. That way he gets that maximum range of motion we can work our traps through. So let's go up again, Bret, 1-2 seconds, get as high as you can, then go down nice and slow, get that really good stretch and repeat that. That is your basic shrug and that's how we want to see you do it every time. What we want to avoid is letting this turn into like a combination rack pull, deadlift shrug thing. Essentially, what we're going to see very often, you're going to either see very quick reps like this, which again, we want to avoid, or you're going to see people lean forward a little bit and then drive up from that position because they're trying to do too much weight. They want to go through this really big range of motion, so they wind up having to use their hips. Those are the two things you want to avoid in the shrub. Let's give them one more good crack at this breath. So he's going to break the bar, stand up and squeeze his glutes. It's up. It's 1-2 counts that maximum contraction in the traps. Get a really good stretch and then come back up again, and that is the ideal way to get the barbell shrug done. So that is the barbell shrug. And as I have said multiple times in this video, no, it is not a necessary move, but it can be a fun one. And if you are badly in search of big traps, it is a solid option. Now, I would rank this overall behind dumbbell shrugs and kettlebell shrugs simply because if we use those other implements, we're not going to have to break the bar as aggressively. I'm going to have a lot more of a friendly angle to work with overall so that we can attack our traps. The upside of the barbell shrug though, is that more than those other moves, we can really load this aggressively and go crazy heavy and again, we get that cool ego stroke. However, if you use it, this is not a lead move in any of your workouts. Instead, we're thinking about making this the very last exercise that we do on back day or on shoulder day after we've drawn more critical, larger range of motion moves like our shoulder presses, our heavy dumbbell rows, or our lap pull downs. Then you get to the barbell shrug and you can think of doing this for two to three sets of 11:50 reps We want to make sure that we're going heavy on this, but we still want to keep things high Rep because your traps are an incredibly strong muscle that is meant to be pushed hard. So if you are really, really searching for mountainous traps, then yes, you want to get the shrug in your workouts. It is not an exercise that you need to do, but it is fun to do every so often because it's always fun to pick up heavy things.