Smith Machine Shrug: Muscle Worked, Benefits & Alternate

You’ll want to learn about smith machine shoulder shrug exercise and want to include it in your workouts for a stronger, better-looking traps. Then you are at the right place, here we will discuss the benefits of smith shrug exercises and how to do smith machine shrug exercises with the best variation and alternate of it.

If you neglect your traps and fail to strengthen them alongside the other muscles in your back, it can lead to poor posture, decreased performance, and even injury down the line.

However, if you use smith machine shoulder shrugs exercises to strengthen and balance the muscles in your traps, your overall performance will improve, and you’ll be able to lift even more weight.

Smith Machine Shrugs Benefits

Here are the benefits of a doing shoulder shrug exercises on smith machine:

Muscle strength & growth: Practicing smith shrug workouts is one of the most effective ways to increase hypertrophy in the back and shoulders.
Builds Traps: Traps are tricky to build. There are only a handful of exercises that mainly target your traps.
Improve your posture. When practiced with proper form, behind the back shoulder shrug help build strength in your upper body stabilizer muscle groups, helping you stand up tall and keep your back straight.
Stronger traps can help reduce neck pain. Strengthening your traps increases the activation of your shoulder muscles, helping provide better support to your head and neck.
Allow to lift more: A Smith machine may let you lift more weight because you can focus on lifting (shrugging) the weight instead of balancing (this machine locks the bar in a fixed pathway).

Smith Machine Shrug

Shrugs can be performed with different equipment, but they are most commonly performed with a barbell or a pair of dumbbells.

The barbell shrug is perhaps the go-to movement when looking to tone or puts on mass on the trapezius muscle. There are several variations of the barbell shrug, smith machine shrug in one of them.

The Smith machine shrug is an upper-body exercise, targeting the traps (trapezius muscles). It is usually performed for moderate to high reps, such as 8-12 reps per set or more, as part of shoulder or trap-focused training.

Smith machine shrugs muscles worked

Primary: Upper Trapezius

Secondary: Middle Trapezius, Levator Scapulae

How To Do Shrug On Smith Machine

Stand in a Smith machine holding the unlatched bar with an overhand grip in front of your thighs. Both your hands and your feet should be shoulder-width apart.
Lift your shoulders toward your ears as high as possible while keeping your arms straight.
Hold the contraction for a second before lowering the bar back to the starting position.
Repeat for the desired number of repetitions.

Pro-Tips

Focus on lifting the weight with your traps, not by your biceps.
Pausing at the top of the smith shrug makes the exercise more challenging, and you’ll get more out of it.
The shrug is a simple up-and-down movement; don’t roll your shoulders—it doesn’t provide any extra muscle stimulation and actually increases the chance of getting hurt.
Don’t bend your elbow as you lift weights. Keep your arms straight as you try to touch your traps to your ears.

Smith Shrug Variations

Smith Machine Behind-the-Back Shrug

It is the variation of the smith machine shrug. The smith machine behind-the-back shrug is an upper-body exercise targeting the traps (trapezius muscles).

It is usually performed for moderate to high reps, such as 8-12 reps per set or more, as part of shoulder or trap-focused training.

How To Do Behind The Back Smith Machine Shrug

Stand in a Smith machine holding the unlatched bar with an overhand grip in the back of your thighs. Both your hands and your feet should be shoulder-width apart.
Lift your shoulders toward your ears as high as possible while keeping your arms straight.
Hold the contraction for a second before lowering the bar back to the starting position.
Repeat for the desired number of repetitions.

Best Alternate or Substitutes of Smith Machine Shrug

Before we deep dive into the best smith shrug alternatives. We must remember, a good smith machine shrug alternative will be able to satisfy the following criteria:

1. Activate the traps muscle groups, which is trained in the shrug.

2. Isolate the muscle groups during execution

3. Train the traps muscle through a longer range of motion

1. Barbell Shrug

Barbell Shrug is one of the best exercises to build bigger, stronger trapezius muscles. This exercise can be done extremely heavily to thicken the traps that really help you in doing back poses. Barbell Shrug is one of the best isolation exercises for trapezius muscle.

The barbell shoulder shrug exercise is one of the most simplistic and easy trap exercises to perform. You can do the shrug either using a dumbbell, Barbell, and smith machine. But barbell variation is the classic variation to build massive traps.

2. Cable Shrug

The cable shrug is a variation of the shoulder shrug and one of the best trap exercises that are utilized to build the trapezius muscle of the upper back. It’s one of the best exercises for isolating the traps and offers versatility to further improve development.

For More Replacement Exercises:

Frequently Asked Question

Can you shrug on Smith machine?

You can do the shrug on a smith machine. It is one of the best ways to build stronger shoulder muscles.

Smith machine shrugs Vs dumbbell shrugs Vs Barbell Shrug

Barbell and dumbbell shrug also allow for a more natural arc of movement. Dumbbell shoulder shrug required more balance than barbells or smith machines that can lead to greater muscle fiber recruitment.
The Smith machine offers a controlled path of motion and safety latches if you get stuck.
Dumbbell shrugs are done with dumbbells and allow for more range of motion and symmetry.
You can do shrugs with a heavier weight when using a barbell compared to using dumbbells.
Smith shrugs will slightly activate the rhomboids and spinal extensors more due to the fact that the bar is pulling you forward.
Dumbbell and barbell shrug require the most help from shoulder stabilizer muscle groups. This helps strengthen muscles that are often difficult to target, such as the rotator cuff, which can make you stronger and less susceptible to injuries.
The Smith machine relies on fewer stabilizer muscles, but this benefit comes with the tradeoff that smaller, weaker muscles will not interfere with your strength. This means you can lift heavier weight.

Takeaways

You can do shrugs with the Smith machine to build muscle and strength in your traps.

The constant tension placed on your muscles through a range of motion, allowing progressive overload to take place, leading to strength and muscle gains.