3 Placing the oblique separation

Once we understand the front torso’s large groups of muscle, it becomes important to find the placement of the separation between these simple groups. The pectorals are rather easy here, lying just about halfway down the form of the ribcage.

Placing the obliques is a slightly more difficult problem, that thankfully has a simple solution. We can think of this separation as radiating out from the nipple, heading towards the ASIS.

Another, subtler upshot of this once we continue to refine our groups is we can use the nipple in a similar way to place the sub-group of the serratus, a fan-like muscle expanding from the back. In this way the nipple can be an extremely useful landmark when it comes to placing these details.

Part of the reason for this is that the nipple exists on the corner of the plane change between the front and side planes of the chest, and more broadly the torso. Since the obliques fundamentally lie on the side plane and the abdominals fundamentally on the front, this relationship makes perfect sense.