Body Fat Calipers
Body Fat Calipers
Why use Body Fat Calipers to measure your body fat?
Because the amount of fat you carry can make a difference to your shape and health. Because fat isn’t as dense as muscle, any significant deposits will fill more volume and make you balloon out. It also gathers in particular places – around the stomach in men, and on women’s hips and thighs, contributing to an unbalanced physique. Excess fat stresses the joints, can cause postural problems, and is also linked to heart disease and stroke, cancer and diabetes. Plus it’s hard work to carry that stuff around all day. Body fat calipers will help you determine how much excess fat – if any – you’re carrying.
Body fat calipers – good thing, bad thing? I’m wary of recommending anything that seems designed to give you a hard time, but my hasty research seems to show that body fat calipers can be a useful weapon in your weight loss efforts. They come with a caveat, though; they can’t measure your body fat exactly because they don’t measure your body fat percentage directly. They don’t really have to. As long as you can use them to monitor your progress accurately, over time, that’s all that matters. Seems a healthier notion to me to be taking a body fat measurement with body fat calipers once a week rather than facing a set of just-as-inaccurate weighing scales every morning.
Body Fat Calipers work by pulling subcutaneous fat away from the muscle, at several predetermined sites. You measure these folds with a gauge which records the thickness of the pinch created by the tongs, and note this figure down. Imagine you’ve just taken skinfold measurements with your body fat calipers. You now have a bunch of numbers relating to your subcutaneous fat. Hey presto, plug those numbers into a formula to work out your body fat percentage…
And that’s where the trouble starts. There are at least a hundred equations you could use. And if you use the wrong one, your calculation will be way off.
Each equation relates to a different group of people with different characteristics. The young store about half their body fat under the skin. As we age we store more body fat internally. No equation has been written precisely for you, so you will never get an exact result. Using body fat calipers as a way to determine body fat percentage gives you 4% accuracy at best.
When you use body fat calipers, what’s the best way to make certain you don’t use the wrong equation? Don’t use one at all. Don’t convert skinfolds into a body fat percentage, just jot down the measurements and monitor their change over time. If you really must have a number for body fat percentage then just use it as a benchmark for progress. Don’t compare numbers with your friend who was tested by someone else.
Are all body fat calipers the same? Not really. The Accu-Measure Personal Body Fat tester listed below is probably the only one that allows you to self-test. I’ve listed a couple more.
Sequoia Fitness Products Metacal Body Fat Caliper (Just pinch, click and read)
Accu Measure Fitness 3000 Personal Body Fat Tester
Sequoia Fitness Products Warrior Digital Body Mass Caliper
First of all, get rid of any notion that body fat is a bad thing. It provides cushioning for internal organs and acts as a food supply in hard times. I’m guessing, if you’re a regular user of the site, that you’re a woman. In which case you’ll be carrying more body fat than most men. This is entirely natural and healthy. The average woman might be carrying 25% body fat, the athletic woman perhaps 15%, as opposed to around 20% and 10% respectively for their male counterparts.
Before you go worrying about your own body fat percentages, remember that these figures were plucked from the internet, and treat them with the same cynicism you reserve for the evening news. Never use someone else’s numbers to beat yourself up. I stand by the Mirror of Truth Test if you really want to check whether or not you need to lose weight. That said, body fat calipers are a useful way of keeping tabs on your weight loss efforts, and as such could be a good motivational tool.
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