✅“Widen gently across the collar bones!” If you’ve heard this at your posture or Pilates classes, this anatomical picture may help you in visualising why you are being asked to do just that.
✅ Notice how the collarbones stretch from your breastbone to your shoulder tip. By focusing on lengthening across them, you will help to place your shoulders and shoulder blades in a better alignment and posture.
✅ This cue also allows for you to gently build endurance to work against the effects of gravity and the slumped shoulder postures. This is done by the subtle yet ongoing work of your upper back and shoulder blade muscles.
✅ This means happy days for your trunk posture, your shoulders, your neck and upper back!
Where are the collarbones and what do they do?
Your collarbones (the clavicles) are the two slender bones stretching from your breastbone at the centre of your chest out to the tip of each shoulder. They are the only bony link between your arm and your trunk — a strut that holds the shoulder out from the ribcage so the arm can move freely.
Nearly every muscle that moves the shoulder and neck either attaches to the collarbone or pulls on the structures around it. That is why collarbone position and shoulder posture are so tightly linked: when the shoulder blades sit well on the ribcage, the collarbones are held long and wide; when the shoulders slump, everything in front closes down.
Why good posture makes collarbones more visible
Slump and the shoulders roll forward and in, the chest closes across the front, and the collarbones flatten back out of sight. Widen gently across the collarbones — the cue from your posture and Pilates classes — and the shoulders draw back and down, the chest opens, and the collarbones sit forward and become more visible again.
This is not about weight loss, and nothing is being done to the bone itself. Posture changes how prominent the collarbones look simply by changing where the shoulders rest on the ribcage. The same reason a slumped posture hides them is the reason good posture shows them off.
Are uneven or straight collarbones normal?
Almost everyone’s collarbones are slightly uneven — one sits a little higher or more forward than the other, usually from handedness, old falls or sports, or simply the posture habits of daily life. Collarbones do not need to look perfectly straight or perfectly even to be healthy.
What matters is how the shoulders sit and move on the ribcage. If one collarbone looks markedly different from the other, or an uneven collarbone comes with pain, a lump, or weakness in the arm, that is worth a physiotherapist’s assessment — posture exercise works on the holding patterns around the bone, not the bone itself.
How physiotherapy and Pilates help
If you feel you are too stiff and tight across your chest or upper back to achieve this, see a physiotherapist — they can find where the restriction sits and free it up. Pilates classes and posture-based exercise will help you achieve the endurance and strength required to maintain these postures right throughout your day — our 40 Minute Shoulders and Posture class is physio-led and built around exactly these cues.
Start with the posture basics on this site: spot the habits with posture cheats: are you a chest gripper?, find a level pelvis in simple postural awareness: the pelvic bowl, and actively sit and untuck your tailbone to set the foundation the collarbones rest on.
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