What Do Your Shoulders Have to Do with Breathing?

Whether we are singers or wind musicians, many of us have heard this admonishment from our teachers: “Keep your shoulders down!” But why do they say that? What do your shoulders have to do with breathing anyway?

Let’s look at the facts

First, let’s define what shoulders are and are not. Everyone knows what a shoulder is, right? But not so fast. Shoulder is a vernacular term we use to loosely include the shoulder blade, the collarbone, and…that place where the upper arm bone joins…something?

If we are really being accurate, there is no anatomical part called the shoulder. Sure, we can go to the butcher and ask for a beef shoulder, but in the meat vendor’s vernacular, we would be talking about a region of muscle—meat. So maybe that’s not it.

Think of the arm structure, starting at your fingertips. The bones we think of as fingers—three bones for the four “fingers” and two for the thumb—join with the five metacarpal bones that make up the “hand.” These are joined to eight bones that are collectively called the “wrist.” Connected to the wrist are two forearm bones (the ulna and the radius), which are in turn connected at the elbow joint to the upper arm bone (the humerus).

Notice that our everyday terms—finger, hand, wrist— are imprecise.

Now we are at the point that we might start talking about the “shoulder.” But let’s pursue this further. The humerus is joined to the shoulder blade (also called the scapula) via a small indentation in the end (the distal part) of the shoulder blade called the glenoid fossa. This joint is technically a ball and socket joint, but it is extremely shallow, which is why we have such a large range of motion at that joint. The shoulder blade is connected to the collar bone (also known as the clavicle). The collar bone is connected to the top of the breast bone, or sternum, where the arm structure is finally attached to the central part of the body, or the axial skeleton.

“Shoulder” is an inexact term. It’s kind of a region, defined differently by different people.

Shouldering the burden of truth

So what do your shoulders have to do with breathing? In a very real way, nothing at all. 

However: your lungs fill up your rib structure all the way down to the diaphragm and all the way up above your collar bones. When you take a breath, your ribs swing up and out. Your top ribs are just below where your collar bones are attached to your sternum. So when your top ribs, along with all the rest of your ribs, swing up to expand your thorax, they slightly push up your collar bones. Your collar bones rise passively. So good breathing necessarily means that your whole arm structure gently rises at the top of your breath.

What it really means

“Keep your shoulders down” may come from the tendency of some people to actually lift their whole arm structure—a shrug—so that the arms move up toward the ears when they take a breath. I have seen children do that when they are told to take a big breath. So perhaps keeping shoulders down makes some sense. But forcefully keeping the arm structure down only limits the free movement of the ribs, and therefore, the breath.

So next time you hear someone say “keep your shoulders down when you take a breath,” they may be misinformed, or they may be just saying to avoid shrugging when inhaling. But now you know: the shoulders—that is, the whole arm structure—move, passively, when you take a good breath. 

Breathing requires movement. Your body knows how to move to take a breath if you let it.