reckonerDumbbell shrug
A dumbbell in each hand, hanging at your sides, and shoulders that lift straight up. The bells are not in front of your thighs, which means your arms can sit where they suit you, and that turns out to matter more than it sounds.
Lift straight up, don't roll the shoulders.
- Pattern
- Shoulder isolation
- Trains
- Traps
- Kit
- Dumbbell
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 sets of 12 to 15 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 2 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Simple to learn
- Recovery cost
- Low
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Neck
Muscles worked
How to do it
Stand tall with a bell in each hand
Arms straight down at your sides, palms facing in, ribs down, chin level. The dumbbells should hang clear of your legs rather than resting against them.
Lift both shoulders towards your ears
Straight up, elbows locked out, nothing bending. Lift straight up, do not roll the shoulders, which is the cue on your wrist.
Hold the top for a second
Stop where the shoulders stop and hold. Without a pause the set becomes a bounce, and a shrug has too short a range to survive being bounced.
Lower until the weight hangs from the shoulders
Let the shoulders travel all the way back down before the next rep. Feeling the bells pull down on you at the bottom is the range you are supposed to be training.
What goes wrong
Letting the bells rest on your thighs
Standing with the dumbbells pressed against your legs takes the bottom out of every rep and gives the load somewhere to sit. Keep them hanging free, slightly forward or slightly out.
Rolling the shoulders
Rolling has not been shown to cause harm. What it does is add travel that your shoulders are not lifting the load through, so the rep gets longer and the work does not.
Missing the one advantage dumbbells have
With a bar your arms are pinned in front of you. With dumbbells they are not. Shrugging with the arms held about thirty degrees out from the body produced significantly greater upper and lower trapezius activity than shrugging with them at the sides2.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 30 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 30 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 30 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 30 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 30 kg | Load up 30 kg → 32.5 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 2.5 kg to 32.5 kg and reps reset to twelve. |
| 5 | 3 x 12 at 32.5 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 32.5 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
Dumbbells or a barbell?
Dumbbells let the arms sit slightly out from your body, which raised measured trapezius activity compared with keeping them at your sides2. A barbell lets you load more. Reckoner keeps the two in one lane, so you can move between them without splitting your history.
How high should my shoulders actually go?
As high as they will go without your head sinking between them or your elbows bending. It is a short range, which is why the pause at the top matters so much more here than on a longer lift.
Do I even need shrugs if I deadlift and row?
Those load the traps isometrically rather than through their range, and the unilateral shoulder shrug produced the greatest upper trapezius activity of ten exercises measured together1. Whether that is worth spending sets on is a volume question and yours to answer.
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