Starting Strength

motion and good leverage position. In fact, to be effective, barbell shrugs must be done very heavy. But they are an advanced exercise, and not everybody should do them. The fact that they are done so heavy means that a novice lifter unadapted to heavy weights, in terms of bone density, joint integrity, and motor control, can become very injured very quickly even when doing them correctly. An impatient friend of the author broke the spinous process off of C6 doing these prematurely. Barbell shrugs ( Figure 7-3 ) are best left for competitive lifters who have trained for at least a couple of years, and there is no real reason for athletes who are not powerlifters or weightlifters to do them at all. They are included here for the sake of completeness, lest anyone think that they do not exist.

    Figure 7-3. The barbell shrug.

    If you are sure you’re ready, set your rack pins at mid-thigh and load the bar inside the rack to 135 pounds. A shrug is done like the top part of a power clean, and the best warm-up for a shrug is racking the bar on the shoulders with 135 from this high position. This warm-up establishes the correct movement pattern for the subsequent heavier sets and weeds out the novices: if you cannot easily hang-clean 135 from a dead stop on the pins, you have no business doing heavy shrugs. After a couple of sets of five at 135, add another big plate and try to clean it for five. If you can, good; if you can’t, you have shrugged it. The mechanics of the movement should be the same as the second pull of the clean, the heavier weight limiting your ability to rack the bar on your shoulders but with the rest of the movement intact. As the weight goes up, the bar will travel less and less, until for the last warm-up and the work set, the elbows do not even unlock and only the hips, knees, and shoulders move.
    The point of this heavy load is to make the trapezius muscles finish what the hips and legs have started. The key to the movement is the snap that must be used to make the traps work at the top. The bar will start up slowly from the pins, and you will have your chest up, your low back locked VERY tightly, and your elbows straight; then you will shrug your shoulders back explosively, as if to touch the top of your traps to the back of your skull. Now, this does not mean that the head moves back – it means that the traps shrug back and up, not forward toward the ears. Do not try to hold the position at the top. For each rep, catch the bar in the finish position of the deadlift and lower it back to the pins. Don’t let the bar fall from the shrug back onto the pins without catching it at the hang; this is an excellent way to hurt your back or hips very badly. Each rep starts at and is returned to the pins; this requirement distinguishes a proper barbell shrug from incorrect versions in which all reps start from the hang and there is no explosive movement. The start from the pins, using hip and leg drive to propel the bar up into the trap shrug, is what allows the enormous weights to be used and causes it to be such an effective exercise.
    Heavy shrugs make the traps grow; there is no doubt about it. At lighter weights, done with sets of five at the 1RM deadlift weight, they are good for cleans, and at heavier weights, they prepare the traps for the top of the deadlift and prepare the brain for the feel of very heavy weight. The heavier sets will always be done with straps, due to the snap that must be present at the top when the traps shrug the bar. One work set after warm-ups is enough; sets across are extremely stressful due to the heavy skeletal loading involved in supporting this much weight, even for the brief time it takes to complete a rep. Likewise, barbell shrugs should be used conservatively in the schedule, maybe once every two weeks in the appropriately designed program.
     
    Notes about the power rack . The rack pull and the barbell shrug obviously depend on the power rack, and its design is critical for these and all the other exercises in this program that can be done in one. A good rack should not be too expensive, and some of the simplest designs are actually the best. The rack should have a floor – it should not be merely on the floor, with you standing on something that is not also holding the rack down. A heavy plywood floor inside the rack and attached to the frame ensures that the weight of you and the loaded bar is always acting to stabilize the rack, so that when you set the