The Alien Back; Bulletproof guide

Creating an Alien Back

To create powerful and explosive trap muscles a combination of mobility and strength training is needed. To recap, these muscles (upper and middle) aid in shoulder elevation and scapular upward rotation, providing the necessary stability and force generation for explosive non-back upper-body movements. Engaging the upper traps efficiently enhances the speed and power in actions like overhead throws, punches, and explosive lifts (deadlifts, cleans, etc.), making them pivotal for athletic performance.

Incorporating targeted exercises to strengthen and activate the upper traps can improve overall explosiveness and athletic prowess. To do this, we need a combination of strength and explosive exercises, without, of course, forgetting mobility and functionality.

The upper traps, especially in heavy lifters, are often extremely tight. Tight upper traps cause lots of problems in your upper body because of their connecting points to the shoulders, neck, and spine. Tight upper traps can lead to discomfort and pain in the neck and shoulders as well as a restricted range of motion in those areas.

Test for Tight Traps

A common test to see if your traps are tight is to raise your hands over your head while keeping a firm abdominal contraction. If you can’t get your hands at least parallel to your body, they are tight. Tight traps will cause postural issues, which can lead to muscular imbalances. Also having a lack of flexibility in an area will generally impair nutrient delivery which results in greater fatigue and a reduction in your ability to recover.

Tightness in the traps is also related to stress, I believe because the traps are the main defenders of the neck, when dealing with stress we often spend more energy in defensive postures rather than powerful and relaxing ones. These points perfectly illustrate why the traps must be tension-free and flexible before we can properly blow them up.

Mobility: Neck rolls, Shoulder rolls, Chin tucks, Wall angels, Dead Hangs

Strength and Power: Shrugs, Deadlights, Rows, Cleans, Pullups

Secret Hack

Every exercise is a back exercise if you do it wrong. You can train your traps purely by cheating your form in a variety of exercises. This will let you effectively overload the muscles and increase the weight and/or repetitions. What I mean by this is when performing bicep curls, for example, you can cheat on the last couple of reps and shrug the weight up. The same goes for lateral raises, etc. By cheating you gain much more explosive power in the movement and you can use heavier weight and train more intensely. This was a technique used by Arnold in much of his earlier training days and is effectively ego-lifting. Now, for bodybuilding and hypertrophy training regimes, this training style is not as effective. However, when we talk about it from a strength and fast twitch muscle perspective, it becomes an extremely effective technique for building that type of power. So cheat your way to massive traps and huge power.