You may view the traps as essential part of a muscular physique, but outside of their aesthetic value, they're vastly more important than you may realize. The trapezius muscle helps you move your head, arms, neck, torso, and shoulders. Your traps help your arms stay in their sockets when your lifting heavy weights. Outside of the bodybuilding element they're such an important element to your overal athleticism also.
Now they're many exercises that work the traps and that's a great thing because you're working them even if you don't realize it. You can do rack pulls, deadlifts, and shrugs to name a few for massive traps. Now these are all great trap builders that I have been utilizing for many years, but for my personal favorite theres one go to. The king of trap builders, the Farmers Walk.
The Farmers Walk is such a great exercise because it incorporates your whole body and it's easy to do. Farmers have always carried heavy things, like feed buckets for instance, over long distances, hence the name. They're a staple in strong man competitions and a key indicator of overall strength. It incorporates total body muscle recruitment. It will increase your strength, power and give you the foundation for overal gains. The more load your frame can handle the bigger and stronger you will get. It works your back, traps, lats, forearms, legs, core, and is an awesome grip strength increaser.
The Core:
The Farmers Walk is an undervalued exercise for your abs, and overall core. A strong core will help you prevent back injuries and increase your athleticism and mobility. Try using one dumbell, on a single side, instead of two for a few sets to really get your core activated. Your stabilizers will be screaming at the end of your set.
How To:
There's a ton of ways you can do farmers walks. If you have a short area to work within pick the heaviest weight you can handle for one-two minutes and walk from one end of the area to the next. Just make laps carrying the weight in the space you have available. Concentrate on 3-4 sets of carries. If your outside or have more distance to work with you can pick a lighter weight and just walk over a longer distance as long as you can handle the load.
You can use dumbbells, kettlebells, barbells, or anything heavy that you can carry. If your really concentrating on trap building you can go as heavy as you can by using straps to prevent grip failure during your sets. A set of farmers walks should last until your grip goes and you reach failure if you truly want to trap build.
Farmers Walk Shrugs:
You can incorporate shrugs into your farmers walks to absolutely demolish your traps. Stop and complete a set of shrugs during your sets and then continuing the walk. It's an absolute ass kicker.
If your not doing them you should be. Be sure to document with some pics so you can track your progress.
Stay Strong and Stay Up.
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