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Body Fat Calculator - What is Body Fat Percentage?One popular measure of fitness is body fat percentage. But that doesn't mean much to your average person. What is body fat percentage? How is body fat calculated? Is there a body fat scale? What should by body fat be? Let's start with some basics. Everybody has fat inside their body - some fat is in fact VITAL for a body to function properly. So when we measure body fat, we first have to consider what is called "essential fat" which is what every human body needs just to be alive and functioning. This number varies for men and women, since a woman's body is designed to carry slightly more fat for childbearing and other reasons. For men, the base level essential body fat percentage is between 2%-5%; for women, it is 10%-13%, give or take a percentage on both measurements. A top conditioned athlete would have about 4-10% more body fat than the essential level - so something like 6-14% for men and 14-20% for women. Obesity is generally considered to be 32%+ for women and 25%+ for men, while most of us fall into the fitness or acceptable ranges, which is the 10% points or so below the obesity level. In this guide, we will try to answer some of the questions posed above to give you a better understanding of how body fat measurements work and what they mean.
How To Calculate Body Fat Percentage - Measuring Body FatOK, so most of us are not Olympic athletes and actually have a little more of what is called storage fat on our bodies. While nobody wants to be fat, you have to give the body credit for an design that solves an interesting dilemna -- how to deal with times of feast and famine. We haven't always had grocery stores and fast food restaurants to fill up on calories. In the old days, you hunted and gathered for food, and sometimes you had a little, sometimes you had a lot. In times of excess, the body is able to store energy and food in the form of fat tissue - think of it as a built-in pantry for your body. A month later if you had to starve for a few days, your body can consume and live off the fat storage. So fat was meant to be your friend, your emergency food reserves. Today though, with 1000 calorie giant soft drinks and 1200 calorie hamburgers, obesity has become a real problem as people simply consume way more calories than they need, and they never starve to burn off the excess. So as we said most of us carry around at least a few extra pounds of fat stored around our body, whether in our abdomens, upper arms, thighs, butts.Skinfold Calipers - Hydrostatic Weighing - BIAMeasuring body fat can be pretty tough - there are a number of different methods that range from giving you a ballpark estimate to a fairly precise reading. If you've been to the gym and talked to a personal trainer, they have probably used the skinfold caliper method. This involves using calipers (looks like a pair of pliers) to pinch skin in various areas of your body and measure the thickness of that layer to see how much fat is below the surface. Measurements are normally taken on the arms, legs, chest, abdomen, and back. Some methods require just 3 or 4 measurements, some use as many as 9. The end result involves tallying up the numbers and combining them with your age, weight, and height to come up with an estimated body fat percentage. Check out this page to see what and where the measurements are taken on your body: linear-software.com/online.html. Accu-Measure makes a number of fitness calipers ranging from about $12 for a plastic manual model to a $30 digital model, complete with measuring tape (the FatTrack Gold Digital Body Fat Caliper and Myo Tape). The advantages of this type of testing is that it is cheap, quick, and easy to do. The main disadvantage is that the measurement can be inaccurate if the calipers are not calibrated or used properly. One of the most accurate methods for measuring body fat is is called hydrodensitometry or hydrostatic weighing, which is fancy talk for getting weighed underwater. This of course requires more complex equipment -- namely a water tank and underwater scale, not something found in most gyms, homes, or doctors offices! Some colleges have these tanks available for their sports programs, and many offer body fat measurements for around $30-$40 -- call and ask if their is a university near you and you want to try this out. The calculation is done by first weighing the person out of water, then weighing them in water, and comparing the figures based on known ratios and results, since fat has a different density and weight that muscles, bones, and other organs. Things that can throw off the results include waves in the tank and excess air in the lungs (you are supposed to expel all the air in your lungs). Overall, hydrostatic weighing is considered one of the most accurate methods for determining body fat percentage. Bioelectrical impedance (BIA) is another fat measuring technique which involves passing electrical signals through your body and measuring how quickly they pass through you, since electricity passes faster through muscle than it does through fat. Dehydation and food consumption can throw this test off, but it is generally quite accurate when you follow the guidelines.Another complex but accurate method is called DEXA (Dual Energy X-ray Absorptiometry), and it involves a full body scan using an x-ray device. It was originally designed to measure bone density, but one of the by-products is a measurement of fat tissue as well. Unfortunately, it can take 10-20 minutes and can be expensive. There are a handful of other tests as well, but for 95% of us, one of the above methods will probably be used to calculate your body fat percentage. Good luck!
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