Body Composition Testing
Body composition testing is finding out the amount of fat mass, lean mass and water mass that you have. This is the only true way to find out if you are at a healthy weight for your frame. The Body Mass Index that is used by most fitness or health professionals is an inferior way to see if you are at a healthy weight. Many lean athletes will have a body mass index that shows them as overweight or obese since they carry more muscle than the average person.
We use a state of the art electric impedance machine as well as skinfold calipers in order to obtain you true body fat percentage. This will tell us if you are lean, athletic, good health standard, overweight, or obese. You don’t have to be 400lbs to be obese, for most men a body composition in the high 20s means they are obese and a woman in the high 30s is obese. You can have these numbers without weighing very much at all and have all the same health risks as that 400lb person.
We use body composition testing on all of our clients to ensure that they are losing body fat while maintaining or building muscle when going through our program. This is the only way we can get the information we need in order to access the clients progress. Just because the scale doesn’t move doesn’t mean the clients body composition isn’t changing.
If you are training on your own and want to know if you are losing muscle or fat you should get your body composition tested at least once per month.