The seven things a fitted shirt reveals.
Most lifters check themselves shirtless under bathroom lighting at seven in the morning after they've done abs. The worst possible measurement. Your life happens in clothes.
Seven points through cloth.
If any one or two of these read weak, the shirt reads soft regardless of how lean you are. If three or more read strong, the shirt reads built.
Collar fit — the throat-to-shoulder line. A trained neck fills the crew-neck without distorting it. A weak neck looks chickenish — collar gaps, head appears proportionally larger than the body.
The slope from base of neck to deltoid. Lean-aesthetic builds keep this slope shallow — Pitt, Hardy, Bruce Lee all show this. Bodybuilder traps create a steep angle that swallows the neck.
The shoulder bump pushing the sleeve out at the side. The single highest-leverage point for the Pitt-Fight-Club look. Visible deltoid cap = built shirt fit. No cap = the shirt drapes flat off the shoulder.
Fills the collar from below — the line that catches a button-up against the upper sternum. Where men with a flat 315 bench fail this point: their chest is wide, not high. Built upper chest reads in any shirt.
Most differentiating
Shoulder-to-waist ratio. The cinch from deltoid down through the lats to the waist. This is what makes a t-shirt look "athletic" rather than "boxy." Built lats with a lean waist deliver it. Either alone fails.
The lats pushing the shirt out at the sides — visible from a three-quarter angle. Not "wide back from rows alone." Density means the muscle visibly lifts the fabric mid-torso.
Rhomboid
The cinch that defines the V. More important than abs themselves. A 32-inch waist with no visible abs reads leaner in clothes than a 36-inch waist with a six-pack. Body fat plus obliques control this.
Belt-line
Sum the seven. Read the band.
Rate each point 1 (weak) · 2 (average) · 3 (strong). Add. Locate yourself in the table. Run the highest-leverage move in the right column.