How Wide Are 46 Inch Shoulders?

If you want to know whether or not your 46 inch shoulders give you an impressive shoulder girth measurement, then you’re in the right place.

Like the rest of our articles, this guide draws on actual anthropometric data so that we can scientifically determine how broad 46″ shoulders really are.

How Do Your Shoulders Compare?

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Are 46 inch shoulders broad?

A man showing his broad 46 inch shoulders

Are 46 inch shoulders broad for a man? No, 46 inch shoulders aren’t broad for a man because they’re a pretty average measurement for an adult male. Depending on your height, however, 46 in shoulders can certainly look wider than they are.

To be clear, 46″ shoulders are by no means narrow. It’s just that, based on the data that I’ve seen (which was from the US), 46 inches is a fairly normal circumference measurement for adult men.

However, the Average Joe with 46 inch shoulders probably doesn’t have a trim waist—far from it in my best guess. So if you’ve got a small waist, then your 46 in shoulders can look significantly broader than they actually are.

Similarly, if you have muscular 46 in shoulders, then they’ll naturally look bigger and more aesthetic than fat 46 in shoulders. So your body composition really does play a huge role in how any given shoulder size looks.

How can you expand your 46 inch shoulders?

Although 46 inches is already a decent measurement for many people (especially those with naturally smaller builds), you can definitely still widen your 46″ shoulders even further by focusing on the right muscle groups.

The deltoids are a pretty small muscle group, but when you develop all 3 heads, they can definitely broaden your shoulders. So make sure to do your lateral raises, front raises, rear delt raises, shoulder presses, and face pulls.

You obviously don’t have to do all of these exercises, but I recommend doing a shoulder press and then at least one isolation exercise for each head so that you can absolutely maximize your shoulder width gains.

Training your back is also of paramount importance, especially when it comes to increasing the actual circumference measurement of your shoulders. After all, when your back is thick and wide, the tape measure has to stretch further, which gives you a bigger measurement to brag about at the gym!

Bragging or no bragging, the back is important. I’m a fan of pulldowns and lat pushdowns for the lats and all kinds of rows for the traps.

Do many people have 46″ shoulders?

There are plenty of people with 46″ shoulders. But how those shoulders actually look depends on your build and body composition. Let’s go through a few examples so that you can see what I mean.

All else being equal, a short person with 46 inch shoulders will look broader than a tall person with 46 inch shoulders because, in relation to their other bones, the short person’s clavicles are much wider.

That said, clavicle length—like bone length in general—does tend to increase with height. So this is why I’m fond of saying, if you want to be broad, be tall!

Anyway, there are also some people who have 46 in shoulders without training, meaning that they’re skinny. Although most men want to look muscular, having skinny 46″ shoulders is actually a great thing because it means that you have a ton of potential to get substantially wider and significantly boost your circumference measurement.

To say it another way, I’d rather have skinny 46″ shoulders than muscular 46″ shoulders because the skinny guy obviously has the longer clavicles, meaning that he has more potential for shoulder width and size.

The verdict on having 46 in shoulders

A man with a 46 inch shoulder circumference

In summary, it’s good to have 46 inch shoulders because it means that you’re very normal. And in some cases, I wouldn’t be surprised if 46 inches puts you in the above-average category (it really depends on the type of people you’re measuring).

Of course, by training key muscle groups consistently, you can always increase the width and circumference of your 46″ shoulders. So you should be happy to know that you’re in control of how your body looks.