How to Build Muscle: Ultimate Hypertrophy Guide for the Traps

This excellent information from Mike Israetal will help you understand how to grow bigger and stronger traps.

Table of contents

What are the Traps?

“The trapezius is a broad, flat, superficial muscle extending from the cervical to thoracic region on the posterior aspect of the neck and trunk. … The muscle contributes to scapulohumeral rhythm through attachments on the clavicle and scapula, and to head balance through muscular control of the cervical spine.”

Important Training Principles

Before we dive into the training tips themselves, let’s also review our key training volume landmarks and relate them to training the traps:

MV = Maintenance Volume:

“As long as you’re doing compound pulling and perhaps heavy deads, you don’t need direct trap work to keep your traps the same size. Even most advanced lifters shouldn’t see any losses in trap size if completely eliminating direct trap work, so long as they keep hammering their other compound pulling and shoulder work. If you’re just doing maintenance work cause you’re crunched for time and you’re doing shrugs… you could be using your time better!”

Best back exercises for building muscle Hypertrophy Guide for the Traps

MEV = Minimum Effective Volume:

“Most intermediates can make great trap gains with NO direct trap work, as deadlifting, rowing, and side/rear delt training is going to be very simulative of the traps. Once you’re ready for direct work, as few as 4 weekly sets, split into at least 2 weekly sessions, can cause notable growth.”

MAV = Maximum Adaptive Volume:

“The maximum adaptive volume of a single session of any trained muscle group is still speculative, but research suggests it’s probably no lower than 4 working sets per session and no higher than 12 working sets per session in most intermediates.”

“When you design your program and progressions, having lots of sessions with much fewer than 4 working sets per muscle group per week for multiple weeks on end might not be very efficient, and you might benefit from combining a few of these lower volume sessions to get the same volume but in fewer weekly sessions. Also, not exceeding 12 sets per session per muscle group for more than a few weeks is probably a good idea.”

MRV = Maximum Recoverable Volume:

“The traps have a very high fatigue threshold, which is no surprise because they kind of hold your shoulder girdle up all the time! However, excessive trap training will cost you, and in some unusual places, like the distal biceps tendons.”

“That’s right, if you do enough shrugging, you are likely to aggravate your biceps tendons before even your traps are overworked. It’s not very common but it’s a legitimate concern. In the context of heavy back and delt training and especially deadlifting, the traps can see recovery problems from as few as 2 weekly sessions at around 10 sets per session. On the other hand, they can hit MRVs as high as 35-40 sets per week if higher (4-6x) weekly frequencies are used and if side delt and deadlift work is on the lower end, as well as if the exercise selection is lighter shrugs vs. super heavy barbell versions.”

What Exercises are Good for the Traps?

Barbell Shrug
Barbell Bent Shrug
Dumbbell Shrug
Dumbbell Bent Shrug
Dumbbell Lean Shrug
Cable Single Arm Side Shrug
Cable Side Shrug
Seated Dumbbell Shrug
Cable Shrug
Cable Bent Shrug

Hypertrophy Guide for the Traps – Variation

“Within a training session, we recommend including nor more than 1 trap exercise, as doing more than 1 trap movement in one session is likely just a needless burning of potential exercise variations you can save for later days and mesocycles. It’s also needless to do more than one exercise per session because traps have relatively low volume needs and tolerances in the context of an otherwise voluminous upper body program.”

“Within a single week (microcycle) of training, we recommend between 2 and 3 different trap exercises. For example, if you train traps 3x a week, you can do a heavy barbell shrug on one day, a lighter barbell shrug on the next day, and a dumbbell shrug on the last day for 2 total exercises in the week. Because you want to keep exercises variations fresh for when you need to change exercises (through injury or staleness, for example), you should use as few exercises per week (and thus, per mesocycle, as we recommend keeping the same exercises in every week of each meso) as you can to get the job done.”

“If you can just do a few more sets of barbell shrugs and get a great workout, there’s no reason to switch to dumbbell shrugs, for example. If you’re doing an exercise, there should be a reason for it.”

“Lastly, how do you know when it’s time to switch out a given exercise from your rotation to another exercise in your list of effective choices?”

“The decision is based on answering just a few questions about the exercise you’re currently using:”

Are you still making gains in rep strength on the exercise?

“Is the exercise causing any aches or pains that are connective tissue related? And are these getting worse with each week or accumulating over multiple weeks?”

Is there a phasic need for the exercise to change?

“In other words, is the exercise appropriate for the rep range you’re trying to use it for? Heavy barbell shrugs in the 5-10 rep range might be easy to set up and execute, but heavy dumbbell shrugs might be downright annoying (dragging out the 150’s might just cost you more fatigue than the shrug itself).”

Are you getting a good mind-muscle connection on the exercise, or is it feeling stale and annoying to do?