Relative to each individual, I think heavy deadlifts will help your traps out more than anything. They will hit the entire traps, not just the upper part as in shrugs. If you want to make sure you stimulate growth in your entire traps, upper, middle, and lower, experiment with Kelso Shrugs...
There are many different variations of "Kelso Shrugs." For example, in one variation, instead of doing your shrugs standing straight up and down, you may do them either bent over like a row or completely horizontal on a bench, for example:
From
to
and repeat.
http://www.weighttrainersunited.com/latshrug.htmlThis targets the middle portion of the traps as opposed to the upper portion, and will bring out your middle back thickness if that is an area you need to target. Try them, it
really works!
My favorite shrug variation is on a low pulley. Try it, you'll love it to death. Go to the cable machine, set it on the low pulley, attach a straight bar, and sit on the ground on your butt with your legs straight. Get close enough you can just reach the bar, and secure your feet by having so much weight to push on you won't move when you shrug the stack. Be far enough back there is slight tension (no slack) in the cable. Shrug the weight straight back by squeezing your blades together as hard as you can. You can go VERY heavy on them and they work tremendously well!
There are many, many productive variations of shrugs to target certain areas. Basically, the more tilted forward, toward the weight, your upper body is, the lower on the traps you will stimulate. See, our conventional method of standing shrugs targets the upper-most part and we're missing out! For more info, check out this brilliant work.:
http://www.amazon.com/Kelsos-Shrug-Book-Paul-Kelso/dp/1587361167/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228650904&sr=1-1Take note, though, you don't want to do too much volume (variation). Maybe one hard, heavy set to failure for your upper traps with standing shrugs then one heavy set to failure with some variation of Kelso shrugs to target either the middle or lower portion. If you're going to do standing shrugs then another variation, I'd recommend the one you're adding to be this variation Donkey Kong recommended in another thread...here's how he described it:
"get a cable with a rope attached into the upper position, like if you wanted to do triceps pulldowns. Now what you do is not grap the rope like you would on cable pulldowns, but you reach under the rope and grap the rope from behind.
Now when you put up your arms, the arms should be in a position like on close grop lat pulldowns. hands are about at height a bit above your ears.
What you do now is to pull your elbows BACK as much as you can and flex the traps in the end."This will target the lower-middle portion; the part the standing shrugs, which target the upper traps moreso, don't so much. Good luck!
