If you are putting in all the work yet results aren’t showing or your traps are lagging, you’re likely making one or more of the following common mistakes.

Performing Too Many Trap Workouts

It may seem like a good idea to do every trapezius exercise available, but trust me, targeting your trap muscles with a bunch of isolation workouts is not something you want because you’ll continue struggling but won’t really hit what you’re aiming for.

The ultimate goal for trap exercises is not merely to flaunt well-built trap muscles; your goal should also include:

• Developing wide lats that go all the way to your lower torso to give your upper body a V-taper
• A bulky tree-like structure in your lower back
• Huge rhomboids that shape into desirable “valleys” when you flex them
• Proper development and clear distinction in the infraspinatus and teres muscles

As you can imagine, all of these take more work than only workouts that focus on your traps. What you should really be aiming for are exercises that work the major muscles of your back, while also doing isolation workouts that target the traps alone.

In a nutshell, you need to include a lot of heavy vertical and horizontal pulling in your entire workout routines. While the vertical pulling smoke the lats and other muscles that contribute to width, horizontal pulling target traps, rhomboids, erector spinae, and other muscles that contribute to the thickness of your back.

Performing Excessive High-Rep Pump Workouts

Here’s one fact that many guys who hit the gym trying to get a pump don’t realize. You’re going to hit a plateau very fast if all you do is focus on getting a pump instead of becoming stronger. Focusing on high-rep pump training such as giant sets, supersets, drop sets, and others like them, are all good and fine and are likely to give you rapid results until they don’t. It won’t be long before all that progress comes to a screeching halt.