The 15 Best Trap Exercises for Size, Strength and Injury Prevention

You probably don’t need any convincing about the aesthetic benefits of trap development. That long, triangle-shaped muscle sitting on top of your back is already a visual favorite — a symbol of raw power that can make or break a physique.

But the frustrating truth is that most bodybuilders with impressive chests still walk around with pencil necks and flat traps, because they’re still drinking the “just deadlift and shrug” Kool-Aid sold to them by the guys with short clavicles who got lucky with shrug genetics.

Here’s the problem with that approach: deadlifts and standard shrugs mostly hammer the upper portion of the traps while completely under-using the mid and lower heads. That’s why so many dedicated lifters put in the work and still have nothing to show for it.

But there’s also more at stake than aesthetics. Direct trap training plays a critical role in preventing shoulder and neck injuries and improving pressing performance. Weak, unresponsive traps make you vulnerable to shoulder impingement, scapular winging and scapular dyskinesis — and nobody wants to find that out the hard way under a heavy bar.

Your trapezius muscle isn’t just the meaty area around your neck. It covers most of your upper back and its most important functions include retracting, depressing, rotating and stabilizing the scapula — all cornerstones of serious weight training.

If your traps are seriously underdeveloped, you can’t afford to train them casually or as an afterthought. They deserve two dedicated days of tough love per week, trained with heavy weights, picture-perfect form and the full range of exercises below.

Why Most Lifters Have Weak Traps

Let’s be totally honest: if you’ve been grinding away with shrugs and deadlifts for years and your traps are still flat, nothing is wrong with you genetically. You probably have broader shoulders and longer clavicles, which means you need to hit your traps in a more targeted way.

Shrugs alone don’t offer a great range of motion, making it nearly impossible to achieve adequate time under tension when performed the standard way — especially when you go heavy and grind out fewer reps. The fix is simple but most people skip it: pause and contract hard at the top of every rep for two to three seconds. That single change will do more for your trap development than doubling the weight ever will.

A good rule of thumb: pay less attention to the number on the plates and more attention to making the contraction as brutal as possible.

Shrugs 101: How to Actually Do Them Right

Since barbell shrugs are the foundation of any trap program, they’re worth getting right before anything else.

The trapezius muscles are predominantly endurance-oriented, which means they respond better to higher-rep work with controlled loads than they do to ego-weight grinding. The correct weight is one that lets you work through the full range of motion with strict technique for three sets of 10–15 reps.

The movement itself: lift your shoulders as high as you can toward your ears, hold the fully contracted position and squeeze hard, then slowly lower your shoulders and get a full stretch at the bottom. You can use a barbell, dumbbells or a shrug machine — all work well.

Two things to avoid: rolling your shoulders forward and back during the shrug (useless and potentially dangerous), and dropping your head forward. Keep your head up and the movement strictly vertical.

The 12 Best Trap Exercises

1. Paused Barbell Shrug

The king of trap exercises, and the backbone of any serious trap program. Paused shrugs take a standard movement and turn it into something genuinely brutal by forcing your traps to hold a fully contracted position under load.

Perform your regular barbell shrug but pause and contract the muscles for three seconds at the top of every rep. For best results, use a cambered bar that doesn’t hit your hamstrings when you shrug it up, and aim for 4 sets of 12 reps twice a week. Mix in four additional sets with dumbbells for variety.

Form: Grab the bar with an overhand grip slightly wider than shoulder width. Let it hang at arm’s length in front of you. Lean about 10 degrees forward at the hips, keep a slight bend in the knees and your back in its natural arch. Shrug your shoulders toward your ears as high as possible, keeping your arms perfectly straight. Pause, then return to the starting position.

2. Dumbbell Shrug

Dumbbell shrugs place less stress on your shoulder joints than barbell shrugs, making them a smart addition to any trap program — especially if heavy barbell shrugging has been causing joint discomfort. Since your shoulders don’t have to rotate to hold the bar, they stay relatively stable throughout the movement.

Form: Grab a pair of dumbbells with palms facing each other and let them hang at arm’s length at your sides. Shrug your shoulders as high as possible, pause hard at the top, then slowly lower the weights back down.

3. Barbell Shrug Behind the Back

This variation effectively targets the upper traps, middle traps and levator scapulae simultaneously, making it one of the most efficient bang-for-your-buck shrug variations.

Form: Stand tall with feet shoulder-width apart, holding a barbell behind your back with a pronated grip, hands slightly wider than shoulder width. Keep a slight bend in the knees. Keeping your arms straight, lift your shoulders toward your ears as high as you can. Hold the contraction for a second, then slowly lower back down. Avoid using your biceps to move the weight and don’t let your head jut forward.

4. Calf Machine Shoulder Shrug

An underrated trap builder that removes grip fatigue from the equation entirely, letting you focus purely on trap contraction with serious load.

Form: Position yourself under the shoulder pads of a standing calf raise machine. As you exhale, raise your shoulders toward your ears and hold for one second. Slowly return to the starting position.

5. Face Pull

Improving scapular movement and building trap strength are the two biggest reasons to make face pulls a staple. Besides a great trap exercise that can replace shrugs in certain situations, they’re also one of the best shoulder health exercises you can do, making them a double win for anyone who presses heavy.

 

 

Form: Attach a rope to a cable machine at upper-chest height. Grab the rope with both hands and pull the weight directly toward your face, separating your hands as you pull. Keep your upper arms parallel to the ground and your wrists higher than your elbows throughout the movement. Slowly return to the starting position.

6. Dumbbell Lawnmower (One-Arm Dumbbell Row)

When performed correctly, the one-arm dumbbell row — nicknamed the lawnmower because it looks like you’re struggling to start a stubborn engine — is one of the best upper body exercises of all time. It involves scapular retraction and depression, spinal extension and compression, plus anti-rotation and anti-flexion tendencies, making it a serious core stabilization move on top of a great trap builder.

Form: Place one knee and the same-side hand on a bench for support. Row the dumbbell explosively with your working arm, driving your elbow up and back. Avoid any spine rounding or shoulder hunching. Best performed pyramiding up to a top set of 8, or five or more sets in the 15-rep range.

7. Barbell Row

Whether you enjoy it or not, the barbell row is one of the most effective exercises for building a strong and stable back — and it’s also one of the best middle and lower trap exercises you can do. The middle and lower traps are responsible for stabilizing the scapula, and unstable shoulders are a direct path to limited strength and increased injury risk.

Form: Grab the bar with an overhand grip slightly wider than shoulder width. Hinge at the hips and bend your knees until your torso is nearly parallel to the floor, keeping your back neutral. Pull the bar to your upper abs and squeeze the shoulder blades together hard, letting your upper back do the work. Don’t allow your back to round. Hold the contracted position for a second, then lower the bar back to the floor between reps.

8. Dumbbell Lateral Raise

Lateral raises are primarily a side delt exercise, but the trapezius gets heavily involved both to assist in raising the weight and to act as a stabilizer — which is exactly why they deserve a place in any solid upper back and shoulder routine.

Form: Stand in a shoulder-width stance, grab a pair of dumbbells with palms facing inward and let them hang at your sides. Turn your arms so your palms face forward and slightly bend your elbows. Raise your arms straight out to the sides until they reach shoulder level, forming a T with your torso. Pause, then slowly lower back down. Avoid rotating your upper arms inward at the top — that’s how you earn a shoulder impingement.

5. Bent-Over Rear Lateral Raises or Reverse Pec Decks

The bent-over rear lateral raises and the reverse pec decks are basically the same movement, performed at different body angles.

Both exercises have powerful ability to hit the posterior delts, traps and rhombs, and thereby optimize shoulder development by killing three birds with one stone – it’s always a good idea to add some extra thickness to these often neglected parts of the shoulder area.

For the bent-over lateral raises, you need a pair of dumbbells, while the reverse pec deck requires access to a pec deck machine. That means that the bent-over version requires maintaining overall balance all throughout the movement, while the reverse pec deck can help you isolate the muscles without having to worry about stability.

That being said, it’s best to alternate both exercises from week to week and get the best of both worlds. No matter what you choose to do, make sure to squeeze your mid traps hard together at the top portion of the movement.

Don’t worry about the weight and just focus on proper form (don’t arch your back!) and achieving an optimal contraction.

10. Incline Bench Dumbbell Shrug

This is one of the best exercises specifically for your lower traps — the most neglected portion of the muscle and the one most responsible for pulling your scapula down into a stable position. If you’ve been skipping lower trap work, this is where you start.

Form: Lie chest-down on a 45- or 60-degree incline bench with a dumbbell in each hand. Let your arms hang straight down on both sides, palms facing each other. Keeping your core tight, shrug your shoulders up while pulling your shoulder blades together. Pause at the top, then return to the starting position.

11. Front Plate Raise

A common mistake here is stopping at eye level. If you want to actually feel your traps working, you need to bring the plate all the way overhead.

The key is using a lighter plate — a 25-pounder beats a 45 every time for this exercise, because higher loads cut your reps short before you’ve done the real work. Aim for the 100-rep mark with a slight bend in the elbows at all times.

12. Behind-the-Neck Press

Back in the 70s, this was a staple among bodybuilders chasing thick lower traps — and it still works. The behind-the-neck press enables a superior level of muscle activation in the shoulders and lower traps compared to a standard barbell front press. It gets a bad reputation mostly because it tends to expose preexisting shoulder problems in lifters with poor mobility or pronounced kyphosis.

The key is dropping your shoulders down hard at the bottom of each rep. If your shoulder mobility is limited, start very light and treat this as a diagnostic tool as much as a training one. If it causes significant pain, address your shoulder health before loading this movement.

13. Kettlebell Upright Row with a Rope

The upright row is already one of the best exercises for building shoulder and trap width — but the kettlebell-and-rope variation takes it a step further. The thicker handle of the kettlebell adds a grip training component and extra forearm work as a bonus.

Form: Thread a few feet of rope through a kettlebell handle and grab both ends about four inches from the kettlebell on each side. Lift until both hands are above sternum height. For maximum gains, use higher set and rep ranges, and keep your rear deltoids engaged throughout.

14. Barbell or Dumbbell Upright Row

One of the best exercises for building shoulder and trap width, the upright row deserves a dedicated spot in your trap program rather than being treated as an afterthought.

 

Form: Stand with feet at a comfortable width and grab a barbell or pair of dumbbells, letting it hang in front of you at arm’s length. Adjust your grip so your hands are roughly in line with your thighs.

Pull the weight straight up toward your chin, leading with the elbows and keeping the bar close to your body. Your arms should go no higher than parallel with the shoulders. Keep your back straight, pause at the top, then return to the starting position.

15. Overhead barbell shrug

The overhead barbell shrug has been the go-to functional exercise for building trap thickness for decades now, and although it has a few important shortcomings, it’s still an exercise that will help you add more mass to your upper traps than anything else out there.

Form: Stand tall with feet at shoulder width apart. Place your hands really wide on the barbell and grab it using an overhand grip. Raise the bar above your head and hold it with completely straight arms.

Lock your elbows, squeeze your glutes and abs, then shrug your shoulders, trying to get them as close to the ears as possible. Hold for two counts at the top, then slowly return to the starting position.

Don’t allow your rib cage to flare out and avoid yanking down too aggressively.

Working Your Traps Indirectly

No trap program is complete without heavy compound pulling. During conventional deadlifts, it’s the traps’ job to keep the upper back rigid so that the force generated by the hips can be transmitted to the bar — every back muscle works hard, including the rear delts. Finish your deadlift reps with a pronounced shrug at the top for extra trap stimulus.

Rowing variations and overhead presses round out the indirect work. If you’re not already including them in your program, add them alongside the direct trap exercises above.

3 Sample Trap Workouts

These workouts are not a replacement for your regular back training — you’ll still need your rows and pull work. Think of these as dedicated trap sessions to be added on top of your existing program.

Sample Trap Workout #1

• Paused dumbbell shrugs: 4 sets × 12 reps
• Dumbbell lawnmowers: 5–8 sets × 8–15 reps
• Front plate raises (25 lb plate): 1 set × 100 reps
• Bent-over rear lateral raises: 4 sets × 20 reps

Sample Trap Workout #2

• Behind-the-neck press: top set of 5 reps, back-off sets of 8–20 reps
• Paused cambered bar shrugs: 4 sets × 12 reps
• Kettlebell upright rows with rope: 4 sets × 12–20 reps
• Reverse pec decks: 4 sets × 20 reps

Sample Trap Workout #3

• Barbell shrug: 4 sets × 12–15 reps
• Bent-over lateral raise: 3 sets × 10–12 reps
• Face pull: 4 sets × 15 reps
• Calf machine shoulder shrug: 4 sets × 12–15 reps

The Bottom Line

A bodybuilder with huge guns and zero trap development looks unsatisfying and incomplete — and the worst part is that traps are an area you simply can’t hide on stage, no matter what. Since a complete physique is the whole point, this body part deserves as much attention as any other.

The good news is that building impressive traps isn’t mysterious. It takes consistent heavy training, proper form, enough variety to hit all three portions of the muscle, and the discipline to stop relying solely on shrugs and deadlifts. Add these workouts to your weekly routine, stay serious about your form, and soon enough you’ll be shopping for bigger T-shirts.