When starting any weight loss, or exercise program, it is important to know how to measure body fat to get the most accurate results from your weight loss or exercise program. When measuring your body fat, you can get an accurate assessment of your physical health. If you think you need expensive tools to get an idea of your body fat, you don't. You can measure body fat at home.
What is a body fat measurement? It is a measurement that gives a percentage of fat to muscle in your body. Having too much fat is a contributor to serious health problems, such as heart disease, diabetes, and high cholesterol. Keeping your body fat within normal limits will obviously leave you slimmer, but healthier as well.
How to measure body fat is really quite simple. Follow these steps:
1. Measure height without your shoes on.
2. Measure the circumference around your abdomen without holding it in. Men use the navel, and women measure around the area with the least width.
3. Measure the circumference of the neck.
4. WOMEN: Measure circumference of the hips (largest horizontal measurements).
Once you have your measurements in place, you can simply plug the numbers into an online calculator that will give you the results you need.
After you know what your body mass is, find out what is healthy for you. While home tests are fairly accurate, there is generally about a 2% margin for error either direction. This usually still gives an accurate enough assessment to set goals to work towards.
Things that might affect your readings include your body type going in the measurements. People that are very fit will usually read a little higher, while people that are naturally thin may read a little low. Being skinny does not equate to having enough muscle.
Men and women have different ranges for normal. A woman's healthy range of body fat is 14-20% for athletes, 21-24% for "fitness", and up to 31% is considered acceptable. A woman is considered obese when body fat proportions exceed 32%.
Men have a range of 6-13% for athletic body range, and 14-17% Is fit. Up to 25% is acceptable, and over 26 is obese.
Men and women both have an essential amount of body fat to be considered healthy. If a man's body fat gets below 2-4%, or 10-12% for a woman, there is not enough fat in the body.
Why use an in-home measurement? Sometimes you just can't beat the honesty of a tape measure. It's convenient, you can do it yourself, and simply plug the numbers into an online calculator. While measuring for body fat, you can also keep a quick update of inches lost while working out. This can be a real incentive, since muscle ways more. Simply standing on a scale can get discouraging when you are gaining muscle, thus weight - even though you may be losing the inches. That is what we are trying to lose, after all.
Go ahead. Take your body fat measurements. Knowledge is power, and once you know what you are starting with you can set a goal and start working towards it.
Don't just learn how to measure body fat ...do something to actually improve it! Check out this Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle review to find out how I was able to go from 18.7% to 10.7% body fat in less than 9 months!
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