Of All the Bones in Your Body, This Is the One You’re Most Likely to Break

Let’s imagine a very strange, evil sort of wager. Say you’re sitting at a crossroads, minding your own business, playing with bits of cat bones and sulfur. Suddenly, to your surprise, a demon emerges from down under. First, he asks if you’re looking to sell your soul, which you are not. Good move, by the way. That usually backfires. Sighing with boredom, he instead turns to his second passion: gambling. He wonders if you might want to make a wager on the next bone you’ll break in your life. You’re not allowed to do it yourself with a hammer, of course, that’s in the contract. Has to be pure happenstance. He offers you, if you win, an incredibly cool ring.

What bone should you choose, based on pure probability? There is an answer, according to all of medical history. That answer is: the clavicle.

You probably know the clavicle by its street name: the collarbone. Unlike many other bones, you can easily give it a tap right now and feel it almost in its entirety, as it spans from your shoulder to the base of your neck. Turns out, that’s part of the problem. The fact that they’re right there on the outside, and that they have very little muscle padding around them as opposed to something like a femur that’s got a whole thigh packed around it, means they're not very well protected.

The other reason they’re so likely to snap at some point during your life, which I can attest to, having broken my own, is that if you take a strong impact to the shoulder area, they’re stuck with the majority of that force. Falls where you land on a shoulder or an outstretched arm will send a whole bunch of unpleasant physics rocketing directly into what isn’t a particularly strong bone.

If you really want to juice your odds, take up cycling. Given that in many bike accidents, you find yourself hurtling headfirst over the handlebars in an inadvisable sort of vault, you’re often landing with significant force on your side, shoulder or arm. As we just covered, that svelte little bit of ivory is the one that’s going to be in charge of handling gravity from there. There’s a reason a broken collarbone is called a rite of passage for regular cyclists.

Hey, it’s unpleasant, but it’s better than breaking your face.