Starting Strength, 3rd Edition - Mark Rippetoe [149]
As simple as this movement sounds, it is very easy to do wrong. Most people will allow their knees to come forward as soon as the bar passes them, making the back angle more vertical and dragging the bar back up the thighs along an angle – and supporting some of the weight on the thighs – instead of keeping the bar path vertical. This knee shift is illegal in the deadlift in a powerlifting meet, since the bar will actually go down a little, and it is referred to as a “hitch.” Your body wants to do this for the same reason the second pull on a clean works: you get a second opportunity to use the quads to straighten out the knees if you re-bend them. But unlike a clean, the rack pull is specifically used to strengthen the hamstrings, and they must be made to do their job as intended to pull the hips into extension while the back stays flat. It is important to stay out over the bar, keep the knees back, keep the bar on the legs, and extend the hips only after the bar is well up the thighs.
Barbell shrugs
The barbell shrug is a type of rack pull that starts up above the knees, at about the point where the hips shoot forward at the very top of the deadlift. Barbell shrugs can be done with very heavy weights, 100 pounds over your PR deadlift or more, due to their very short range of 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