Are the right-angled shoulders of female celebrities natural or concave? Can you have them too?

Real points:

Relying on concave shapes to maintain right-angled shoulders for a long time in life may cause some irreversible damage to the muscles near the shoulders. When doing concave shapes, the shoulders will be in a very tense state. There are many muscle starting and ending points on the shoulder blade. The tense shoulder joints will cause these muscles to be tense or weak to varying degrees, causing shoulder discomfort.

Verifier: Huang Tao | Sports medicine therapist, founder of "Interosseous Rehabilitation"

Before I knew it, summer was over and it was time for the annual fall resolution: "You have to secretly exercise this winter so that you can take off your coat and surprise everyone next summer."

Girls are always worried about their body shape. Fat girls think they are not thin enough, thin girls think their legs are not straight enough, and girls with thin and straight legs may think they do not have right-angled shoulders... As the hottest marketing concept this summer, are right-angled shoulders the right body shape? Will right-angled shoulders created by styling do harm to the body? Today, let's talk about these topics with beautiful girls.

1. Some right-angled shoulders are born, but "70% is determined by nature, and 30% depends on hard work"

First of all, let's clarify what a right-angled shoulder is. Here we have to mention a clothing concept - shoulder slope. It refers to the angle between the line connecting the outer point of the neck root and the acromion point and the coronal axis on the same coronal plane. Taking adult women as an example, their shoulder slope is 10° to 30°, with an average angle of 22°. Shoulder slopes less than 20° are called flat shoulders. Right-angled shoulders can be understood as super flat shoulders, with a shape close to 90° between the neck and shoulders, and a shoulder slope close to 0°.

Shoulder slope diagram

Looking at the picture, you can see that the shoulder slope is mainly determined by the position of the trapezius muscle and the thickness of the upper arm, and the position of the trapezius muscle is related to the bone structure. So regarding whether or not you have right-angled shoulders, we can only say that "70% is determined by fate, and 30% depends on hard work." Some people are born with a curved clavicle that can balance the trapezius muscle, which determines that she/he has flat shoulders. Some people find it difficult to train into right-angled shoulders due to muscle distribution. But don't be discouraged when you see this. "70% is determined by fate," and there is still "30%" left. If you want to make your shoulders flatter, what efforts can we make?

Second, you can create right-angled shoulders by shaping your body, but maintaining this posture for a long time may cause damage to your shoulders.

Some people are born with better conditions, and they can create "right-angled shoulders" by posing when taking photos. Just lower the shoulder blade while raising the humerus, and add scapula protraction and humerus internal rotation. This posture will highlight the clavicle and make you look thinner.

Schematic diagram of the position of the humerus, scapula, and clavicle

But please note that this posture is only suitable for occasional photo taking. If you rely on posing to maintain right-angled shoulders for a long time in your life, it may cause some irreversible damage to the muscle groups near the shoulders.

When doing poses, the shoulders will be in a very tense state. There are many muscle starting and ending points on the shoulder blades. The tense shoulder joints will cause these muscles to be tense or weak to varying degrees, causing shoulder discomfort. At the same time, the shoulder blades are also part of the upper limb bones. For example, the latissimus dorsi connects the upper limbs and the spine. Excessive tension in the shoulder blades can also cause pain in the waist and back.

3. Relax the tense upper trapezius muscle and increase the volume of the deltoid muscle to have healthy right-angled shoulders

Many people in our lives have sloping shoulders and round shoulders. A big part of the reason is that they lack exercise in their daily lives, which leads to weakness of the shoulder and back muscles and tension in the upper trapezius muscles.

Trapezius muscle diagram

As shown in the figure, the trapezius muscle is the back muscle that pulls the head and shoulders back. The upper trapezius muscle helps to lift the shoulder blade, while the middle and lower trapezius muscles are responsible for moving the shoulder blade backward and downward. Many people do not pay attention to their posture in life, hunch their backs and stretch their heads forward for a long time, and their back muscles are not strong enough, so they rely on the upper trapezius muscle to stabilize the neck, which causes muscle tension. If the upper trapezius muscle is too tight, it will visually make the shoulders narrower and the shoulder slope larger.

Upper cross syndrome, one of the causes of round shoulders, tight pectoralis minor and major muscles on the front, and weak dorsal muscles

Therefore, regardless of whether you are pursuing right-angled shoulders or not, you should correct your wrong posture of hunching over and protruding head. This will not only relax the tense upper trapezius muscles and reduce the shoulder inclination to a certain extent, but it is also good for your spinal health.

If you want to further pursue right-angled shoulders, you also need to strengthen the muscles of the shoulders and back. Strong muscles can keep the shoulders and neck straight. In particular, you need to train the deltoid muscles of appropriate thickness to increase the height of the shoulders and eventually get relatively flat shoulders.

It is recommended to go to a professional fitness venue and follow the guidance of professional coaches to develop an exercise plan based on personal circumstances. Most of the tutorials on the Internet are some upper limb stretching exercises and simple joint movements. There is no targeted training for muscles such as the trapezius and deltoid muscles, and they cannot train right-angled shoulders. At most, they can relax the muscles. Excessive stretching may also cause muscle strain.

Some people's round shoulders and sloping shoulders are caused by their natural bone structure. Although the posture is correct, it is impossible to train them into right-angled shoulders, so there is no need to worry too much. Many media and businesses sell body anxiety, and the concepts they hype are not only the right-angled shoulders in recent years, but also the so-called A4 waist and bird legs, which cause girls to always feel that they are not good enough and always run on the road of exercise anxiously. But the concept of beauty is diverse. In ancient times, women considered sloping shoulders beautiful. At that time, everyone believed that sloping shoulders were the representative of female beauty. In Ingres's classical paintings, the women in the paintings do not have clavicles, but they are also beautiful.

Aesthetic fashion is always temporary. Correcting the wrong posture of hunchback and forward head can make your temperament more upright. Blindly pursuing the so-called "beautiful form" through wrong methods is definitely not conducive to physical health. History has proved this countless times, such as foot binding and face painting with lead and mercury. Please believe that a healthy and confident self is always the most beautiful.

Editor of this article: yutonggliu