Today its time to switch gears and put our attention on a muscle group that often gets overlooked. You should be hitting your traps hard at least once a week for maximum muscle gain and to balance out your physique.
Your trap muscles really shape your physique and put the upper body together. Large trap muscles will make your chest look more impressive, and give you a thicker looking physique. Large and thick traps make you look like a beast – plain and simple, so I’m going to gift wrap for you guys an incredible monster traps workout that you can perform to build rock solid trap muscles.
Although this is the monster traps workout – these exercises will also hit your middle deltoids. Many of these trap exercises are proven deltoid mass builders as well, and will work the shoulder muscles indirectly. If you are still hungry for more lifting after the monster traps workout – you should aim to do a shoulder workout as this will continue to hit the traps and shoulders. I typically work out my shoulders and traps together.
This workout will accelerate muscle growth in your traps through a variety of supersets, pre fatigues, and maximum overload exercises. Let’s get right into the routine and blast those traps to freaky muscle gains!
Here’s my “Monster Traps” workout routine:
Superset:Weight Plate Shrugs & Barbell Shrugs
This is a great way to start the trap workout and get the blood pumping in those muscles. Grabbing a pair of 45 lb weight plates and repping it out to pre fatigue the traps and get your upper body loose is typically how I will start my trap workout. Depending on your strength you can either grab 45 lb plates or 25 lb plates. Reach high with your traps on this exercise and go for full range of motion. This will do a fantastic job of pre fatiguing the trap muscles.
Next we are going right into the barbell shrug. This is a great exercise to put maximum overload on the traps and really build thickness. I suggest you use wrist straps to be able to go heavier on this exercise. If you don’t your grip strength will likely limit how much overload you can put on the trap muscle. Make sure you go heavy and go until failure on this exercise.
Dumbbell Shrug Tri-Set
Now its time to get serious with this workout! If you perform the Db shrug tri set properly and push yourself outside your comfort zone, I promise that you will build large and thick traps from this exercise alone! This is by far the hardest part of the workout – as most of you guys have probably never done a tri set while putting maximum overload on the muscles.
How we do this is we start off with a really heavy weight. In the video I start off by doing 110 lbs. We want to break up the repetitions into 6 reps per set – with no rest in between. Make sure you focus on your form during these sets as well – don’t rush through the reps with bad form!
Rack the big boy weight and time to grab your next set of dumb bells immediately. Remember that you want to keep the rest time as little as possible. Grab a pair of dumb bells about 15-20 percent lighter than your 1st set and perform 6 more repetitions of slow and controlled movement.
Lastly – rack the weight and grab the dumb bells for your last set. Again you will be doing about a 15-20 percent less than the previous set. Play around with the weight changes but make sure you are challenging yourself and pushing to maximum overload every time you do this.
I suggest keeping a workout log and tracking what you did each time – and during your next trap workout make sure to either add more weight or an extra rep! This will keep those muscles growing and allow you to reach your potential.
In the video I perform the tri set using 110 lbs – 95 – 75. You will be shocked how weak and tired you feel by your 3rd set – but make sure to maintain proper form throughout.
Dumbbell Trap Lifts
This exercise is performed very similarly to a shoulder lateral raise except with one major variation. You will stop the movement when your arms are perpendicular to your body, and lift just with your trap muscles. Think of this exercise as performing a standard lateral raise – then you pause the movements at the top and just lift with your trap muscles. This does an amazing job of isolating the traps and really burning them out.
This exercise caps off the monster traps workout. We do this exercise at the end of the trap workout because its more of a “shaper” exercise. You always want to make sure to do the exercises you can perform the most weight on at the start of your workout so you have the energy to put the maximum amount of overload on that muscle and accelerate muscle growth.
Conclusion
Remember that your trap muscles and every other muscle group respond best to slow and controlled movements with maximum overload. This is the quickest guaranteed path to maximum muscle growth.
Knowledge is power guys. Now you have the knowledge of how to blast your traps for maximum muscle growth. Now head to the gym and be a beast!
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