maratoolCable Shoulder Shrugs
How to do the cable shoulder shrugs
- Attach a pulley to the lowest setting on cable machine.
- Stand with your feet shoulder width apart, your abs drawn and your back straight.
- Start with the pulley at waist height.
- Grasp the pulley and shrug your shoulders up while keeping your arms extended.
- Hold this position for a moment then with a controlled motion return to the starting position of the pulley to waist height.
Muscles worked
The prime mover is the trapezius, which shrugs the shoulder blade up, rotates it, and pulls it back down.
Even with a single joint doing the moving, the muscle is not working alone — the deltoids stabilise the shoulder and add force at the top of the range.
How this movement works
Everything happens at one joint. That gives you direct control over where the tension sits; the trade-off is that the muscle gets no help, so the load that feels hard here is a fraction of what a multi-joint version of the pattern would take. Slow, complete repetitions beat heavy ones.
It is filed under strength: produce force against resistance for a countable number of repetitions, and progress the resistance over time.
What you need
A cable holds tension for the whole range, including the point where a free weight would go slack. Moving the pulley changes the angle the resistance arrives from without changing the movement.
Every exercise using:Cable
These train the traps too, using equipment this one does not:
- Calf-Machine Shoulder Shrugmachine
- Clean Shrugbarbell
- Dumbbell Shrugdumbbell
- Kettlebell Sumo High Pullkettlebell
- Smith Machine Upright Rowsmith machine + machine
Illustration: Everkinetic — CC BY-SA 4.0 — license. Modified versions are shared under the same license. Full attribution →
ⓘ Informational only — not a substitute for professional fitness or medical advice.