Is There a way to determine your body fat percentage without a machine?
Also what's healthy? I went to a pretty official looking scale in a health store in full clothes and shoes and I held two bars and it told me I was 11.(something)% body fat.
Public Comments
- http://zone.cust.he.net/prothd2.html
- Underwater weighing is the gold standard which means that all other methods are built upon this method. While it is possible the amount of error with some of these quick methods may be huge and what that means is that the number may be very inaccurate and very hard to reproduce. Even calibers are suceptable to human error and poor technique as well as that there may be some error built into the calculations themselves. Also as we age we tend to internalize more fat which can also affect measurements. 11% is very low even for an athletic male although it is certainly possible. The average "healthy" male is actually closer to 15-18% while the average "healthy" female closer to 20-25%. An elite female athlete might get down to 11 or 12%. This is actually considered anorexic clinically and can be very unhealthy for lots of reasons. A competive male athelete might drop below 8 % but again this is the extreme. There are tons of ways to determine body fat. By far the most accurate, dependable and reproducable is the under water weighing. Many trainers and gyms will actually uses electrodes that measure how a pulse is sent through your body. Different tissues have different densities and different conductivities. But even these machines usually require you to be fasting etc. I would not put too much faith on these types of measurements.
