Shoulder Shrugs

🎯 Traps🏋️ DumbbellIsolation

How to do the shoulder shrugs

  1. Stand with your feet shoulder width apart and a slight bend in your knees.
  2. Hold a dumbbell in each hand and with your arms at your sides.
  3. Lower your shoulders as much as possible.
  4. With your arms straight raise both shoulders up towards your ears.
  5. Hold the upright positions for a moment and then lower in a controlled motion.

Muscles worked

The prime mover is the trapezius, which shrugs the shoulder blade up, rotates it, and pulls it back down.

Every exercise for:Traps

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

Dumbbells let each side work on its own, surfacing a strength difference between limbs that a barbell would quietly cover for, and leaving the wrist free to rotate through the movement.

Every exercise using:Dumbbell

These train the traps too, using equipment this one does not:

Related exercises

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.