reckonerBarbell shrug
Hold a loaded bar at arms length and lift your shoulders straight towards your ears. It is the simplest lift in the library and it reaches the upper trapezius harder than anything else measured beside it1, which is why it survives being so dull.
Lift straight up, don't roll the shoulders.
- Pattern
- Shoulder isolation
- Trains
- Traps
- Kit
- Barbell
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 sets of 12 to 15 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 2.5 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Bar
- 20 kg
- Skill
- Simple to learn
- Recovery cost
- Low
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Neck
Muscles worked
How to do it
Take the bar at arms length
Hands just outside your thighs, palms down, arms completely straight. Stand tall with the ribs down and the chin level. If the bar is heavy enough to peel your fingers open, use straps.
Lift the shoulders straight up
Drive both shoulders towards your ears, vertically, with the elbows staying straight. Lift straight up, do not roll the shoulders, which is the cue on your wrist.
Hold at the top for a beat
Pause where the shoulders stop rising. That pause is what separates a shrug from a bounce, and it is what most sets are missing.
Lower all the way down
Let the shoulders travel back down until you feel the weight hanging from them, then start the next rep from there. The bottom of a shrug is a real part of the range and it is the first thing that disappears.
What goes wrong
Rolling the shoulders backwards
Nobody has shown that rolling causes an injury. What it does is add a horizontal arc your shoulders are not lifting the bar through, so a longer rep does less work. Straight up and straight down.
Bending the knees to launch it
A small dip and drive gets the bar moving and the traps join in late, which is a shrug in name only. If you need the legs, the bar is too heavy.
Never pausing at the top
A shrug has a very short range, so a bounced rep is almost entirely momentum. Hold the top for a second and the honest number arrives immediately. The shrug is the shape that produced the greatest upper trapezius activity of ten exercises compared together1, and only if you actually do it.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 60 kg, run through the real engine. Nothing below was typed in: the prescription, the decision and the sentence beside it all come from the same code that writes your week.
| Week | Prescribed | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3 x 12 at 60 kg | More reps 12 → 13 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 3 x 13 at 60 kg | More reps 13 → 14 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 3 x 14 at 60 kg | More reps 14 → 15 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 3 x 15 at 60 kg | Load up 60 kg → 62.5 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 2.5 kg to 62.5 kg and reps reset to twelve. |
| 5 | 3 x 12 at 62.5 kg | Deload 40% of sets offFive weeks of building, then one week lighter. About 40% of the sets come off. The load holds and your reps stay where you earned them, so you keep the strength and lose the fatigue. |
| 6 | 2 x 12 at 62.5 kg | More reps 12 → 13 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. The lighter week is over, so this is back to three sets. |
Real engine output, not an illustration. Every row was produced by running the engine itself when this page was generated.
The full rule, and why the reps move before the load does, is in how Reckoner decides to add weight.
Questions people ask
Is there a better way to do a shrug?
There is a version worth knowing about. When shrugging with the arms at the sides was compared with shrugging with them held about thirty degrees out from the body, every muscle measured worked harder in the second, and upper and lower trapezius activity was significantly greater2. A barbell in front of you cannot do that, and a dumbbell can.
Should I use straps?
For the working sets, yes. On this movement grip is very often the thing that fails first, and stopping a set because your fingers opened tells you nothing about your traps.
Why does Reckoner drop this if I declare a neck problem?
Neck is the restriction recorded against it. The upper trapezius runs up to the base of the skull and the neck, and loading it hard is exactly the thing an irritable neck tends to object to.
Similar movements
Reckoner eases the load first when this lift stalls, and offers one of these only if it stalls again after that. A lift already as light as your kit goes has no load left to ease, so the offer comes straight away. Each of them has a page.
Sources
- Ekstrom, Donatelli and Soderberg, Journal of Orthopaedic and Sports Physical Therapy, 2003. Surface electromyographic analysis of exercises for the trapezius and serratus anterior muscles thirty healthy subjects measured across ten exercises, with the unilateral shoulder shrug producing the greatest upper trapezius activity of all ten, and the greatest middle trapezius amplitudes coming from horizontal extension with external rotation and from an overhead arm raise lying face down, which also produced the greatest lower trapezius activity
- Pizzari and colleagues, Clinical Biomechanics, 2014. Modifying a shrug exercise can facilitate the upward rotator muscles of the scapula twenty-three people without shoulder problems and fourteen with multi-directional instability, shrugging with the arms at the sides and again with them held about thirty degrees out, where every one of the four muscles measured worked harder and upper and lower trapezius activity was significantly greater in both groups