Grab a pull-up bar with your palms facing away from you and your hands about shoulder-width apart. If you can’t reach the bar without jumping, put something on the floor under the bar that you can step on.
Lift your feet off the floor and relax your arms and shoulders, letting your body weight pull your arms straight and your shoulders as high as possible (they should be almost touching your ears).
Keeping your arms straight, pull your shoulder blades down and back to raise your chest and lean back slightly.
Pull your body as high as possible without bending your elbows.
Once you can’t go any higher, pause for a brief moment, then reverse the movement to return to the starting position.
Expert Tips
Keep your elbows straight throughout each rep. Bending them activates your biceps and turns the movement into the beginning of a regular pull-up.
The range of motion is going to feel very short compared to most exercises—you’re just moving your shoulder blades.
Keep the movement controlled—don’t kick or swing your legs to launch yourself toward the bar.
Workout Programming
Typically speaking, scapular pull-ups are best performed either immediately after your regular pull-ups or at the end of an upper-body or pull workout.
In both cases, you generally want to do as many reps as possible until you hit muscular failure (the point where you can’t move the weight with good form despite giving your maximum effort).
Mike’s Take
The scapular pull-up—also called “scap pull”—is a trap isolation exercise and a great way to stretch the muscles and connective tissue around your shoulders.
Specifically, it targets the muscle fibers of your lower trapezius, which is the portion of your traps that’s responsible for pulling your shoulder blades down toward your butt (scapular depression).
You’ll generally see people recommend scapular pull-ups for two reasons:
To train the traps after your biceps and lats are already gassed, typically as part of a pull or upper-body workout.
To stretch and strengthen the muscles around your shoulders.
There’s little research on either use, but there are good physiological reasons to think scapular pull-ups could help with both.
Personally, I like to occasionally do scapular pull-ups immediately after hitting failure on a set of regular pull-ups. Generally, my traps can squeeze out another 3–5 reps after my biceps and lats are gassed.
When it comes to stretching the shoulders, I generally prefer dead hangs over scapular pull-ups. Dead hangs allow you to stretch all of the same musculature, but for longer.
Scapular Pull-Up Alternatives
Dead Hang. You grab a bar with your palms facing away from you, let your body weight pull your arms straight and your shoulders up, and hang as long as you can. A fine exercise for stretching your shoulders, strengthening your grip, and decompressing your spine, but it doesn’t do much for your traps.1
Pull-Up. When performed properly, a pull-up involves the same movement pattern as a scapular pull-up. Or put differently, a scapular pull-up is just the first stage of a regular pull-up.
Lat Pulldown. This is the same movement as a pull-up, but it requires less coordination.
Shrug-Back. This is essentially a scapular pull-up, but performed horizontally instead of vertically.
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