Today I saw something in the gym that really worried me. A guy I see every morning who puts in his work before the office every day totally screwed something up. I really wanted to say something, but I was struggling through my own lifts today and just never got a chance. He was doing dumbbell shrugs and he was doing them in a way that was going to render no benefit and at the same

Shrugs are important. Do them right.

time almost certainly cause pain. Watching this seemingly nice guy who puts in his work at the gym roll his shoulders through his shrugs was killing me. I didn’t get a chance to correct him, but I thought I would take this opportunity to go over shrug basics (yes, this Friday challenge is now going to be a shrugs challenge).

Rolling your shoulders is bad. More than just bad, it is dangerous. When you are holding the dumbbells (or barbell for that matter), gravity is providing downward resistance in the vertical plane. If you roll your shoulders either forwards or backwards, you leave the vertical plane where the resistance is and end up in a horizontal plane where there is no resistance. So right here at the beginning we can clearly see that there will be no positive result from rolling the shoulder as once the resistance is removed or avoided the whole point of the lift (and weightlifting in general) is negated.

You can get horizontal pulling exercises that will target your mid to lower traps by working with horizontal resistance (bent-over rows, seated cable rows, etc.) but shrugs only provide resistance in the vertical plane.  This should be enough to keep people from ever rolling their shoulders during a shrug, but there is more.

Not only does the shoulder roll during shrugs negate any possible positive result of the lift, but awards the added bonus of an

Before doing a lift you should have a good idea of what it does

incredibly increase in injury! As you roll your shoulders, you are putting pressure on your joints.

Damn it Kai!

There is never a lift where we should be looking to add pressure to joints. The weight needs to be focused on your muscles. Until someone figures out a way to make joints able to attain hypertrophy let’s keep the weight off of them. Rolling your shoulders during a shrug will cause the same kind of injury that curling a weight too heavy will cause. With the curling, if the weight is so heavy that your joints need to kick in and take on some of the work because the muscle is overloaded you will hurt yourself. It is not much different for the rolling arm shrug.

So now that we went over how not to do shrugs, let’s talk a little about the correct way to do them.

Stand in a neutral position. If you are holding dumbbells hold them so they hang at your side and if a barbell use a shoulder width overhand grip and let it hang in front of you close enough

Touch your ears!

to touch your thighs. Without bending your elbows, shrug your shoulders straight up as high as you can. Go all the way up as if you are trying to touch your ears. Hold that position and squeeze your traps against the weight. Slowly lower the weight straight back down in a controlled fashion to the starting position and repeat for your desired rep count.

As always, if you are unsure about the right way to do a lift you should ask. Ask a trainer in the gym. Ask someone you know to be a good lifter. Ask here in the comments section. We are grabbing weights and molding our bodies by forcing muscular breakdown. Let’s do it correctly so we don’t get injured.