Skip to main content

Body fat measurement: Part 3

In this final post about body fat measurement I will provide you with some of my measurements and make some comparisons between the various measuring devices. First off the omron body fat scale always seems to give higher body fat percentages than the calipers. However there are some formulas in multi-site measurement using calipers that give fat percentages that are way out of the ordinary.

Bioelectric impedance method
With the omron bioelectric impedance method I am averaging about 11% body fat. I take measurements every day once in the morning and once in the night. I keep averaging the body fat % for the last one week and consider that my body fat % for any given day. Here is the data for the morning readings for the past 2 weeks.



The right most 2 columns are my weight and body fat % as measured by the device. The second column is the average for 1 week. Notice how the absolute measurements vary wildly from day to day. But the average is more smoother.

Calipers
Using the FatTrack digital calipers I usually get lower body fat % than omron. I take these measurements once every week. And the last week measurement is 8.74% using Jackson/Pollock 3 formula. I think this is kind of low given that I can see only very slight definition of abs. Usually at 9% I should have more visible definition. I think omron reading is more closer to my actual fat %. I think I will be like 10-11%.

Plugging in the values in other formulas gave the following results:
Jackson/Pollock 7: 8.45
Jackson/Pollock 3: 8.74
Jackson/Pollock 4: 9.39
Parillo: 17.62
Durnin/Womersley: 12.53


For whatever reason Parillo is an outlier. It shows an unlikely 17.62% body fat. So omron is pretty good for a convenient body fat measuring device. Go for it.

Comments

  1. Thats a very neat, hard-to-find comparison you have. Thanks for posting this. I have ordered the scale; lets see how it works for me.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Stats for Oct 2009

So it has been a month since I started bulking up. How am I doing so far? Here are the raw numbers Exercises Squats: 170 lbs, 8 reps Deadlifts: 185 lbs, 10 reps Bench Press: 110 lbs, 4 reps Pull ups: Body weight + 25 lbs, 7 reps Overhead Press: 75 lbs, 6 reps I am doing well in all exercises except bench press. The exercise that is already closest to my goal for end of december is my pull-ups. I can already do 7 reps with 25 lbs hanging off my waist! You can check out my previous post for the goals I have set. Body weight and fat Weight: 120.8 lbs Fat %: 12.2% I am able to add weight as expected. But my body fat % shot up too much. My goal for end of december was to weight 125 lbs at 12% body fat. But I am already over the limit for my body fat %. So I have to lower it and at the same time increase my weight. Very unlikely. I might have to revise my goals, but I will see how it goes and hope to make better predictions for my next bulking phase. It is not at all easy to ke...

Chin ups and Pull ups

When I first started P90X I could barely do a couple of chin-ups. But in P90X video I see people doing 15 and 20 reps and that is not just in the first set. They consistently do as many chin-ups in every set. I used to question whether I can ever be so strong. I always hated my chin-up days. Not anymore. How did I do it? I just kept doing them even though I could only get 2 or 3. When I could not do any more I used to do negatives. For this I would jump to the chin-up bar so that I am in the top most position. Then I slowly came down. I kept doing it for all the sets where I could not get even 1 rep. Coming down slow is the key. I kept doing as many negative reps as I could get without hurting myself. The next time I did chin-ups I could get 1 or 2 extra reps! That worked very well. I later found another trick that helped me get more energy. The trick is to tighten the abs as I am doing chin-ups. This helped me do a few more reps. I am not doing negatives any more because now I can...

Updates for 2011

It has been more than a year since I updated this blog. But the good news is, I am not as irregular with my gym though. Having moved to India early last year, I had a lot of catching up to do, not to mention all the re-learning that I had to do since it has been almost 9 years in the US. Anyway back to the topic of weight training, I have switched to a new program and this time it is called the Scrawny to Brawny program. Another program for the skinny folks and another attempt to become huge in no time. Meh, it does not work that way. Boring stuff aside, I did really like the organization of the book and the exercise program as well. Basically you start off with a form and body posture correction in Phase I, then move on to some heavy lifting to build up some of those primary muscles in Phase II, and concentrate on lifting very heavy with high intensity low reps in Phase III and finally in Phase IV an attempt to get rid of the huge amount of fat you might have gained in the previ...