Middle Back Shrug

Back · Dumbbell · ×2 dumbbells

You hold two: the weight you log is ONE dumbbell's, and volume counts both.

How to do it

Lie face down on an incline bench with a dumbbell in each hand, arms hanging towards the floor and palms facing each other. **Without bending the elbows**, squeeze your shoulder blades together as if holding a pencil between them, hold a second and release slowly until they are fully apart. The range is a few centimetres and it is done light: what works here is the rhomboids and mid traps, which almost never get trained on their own. The classic mistake is bending the elbow and turning it into a row.

Variants

The drawing shows one way of doing it, and the technique above describes that one. Almost every exercise has variants — standing or seated, the grip, the bench angle — and is still the same exercise: if you do it another way, write it in the exercise note and you will have it every time you train it.

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