
There is one big problem with the study, however.
#Body fat calculator device professional
There is another class of analyzers that use Near-Infrared Interactance (NIA), but these are more likely to be professional tools. The Omron HBF 306C at the gym is one of these and it’s what I used. These tools are cheap (under $40 for a nice one), widely available and relatively easy to use. Since the resistance of fat and muscle are different, in theory they can calculate the percentage of body fat based on this. In more recent years, a variety of devices have come out that send a tiny amount of current through your body and measure how much resistance there is. Enter Bioelectrical Impedance Analysis (BIA) Other athletes who do more aerobically and burn more intramuscular fat might get fairly accurate results from calipers.


Bodybuilders, who tend to retain intramuscular fat, may check in at 3% with calipers, but may test out to 12% to 18% body fat with hydrostatic weighing. In particular, the caliper method does not measure intramuscular fat, only subcutaneous fat. Calipers, however, tend to be subject to a lot of error due to the technique of the person taking the measurement, and also tend to be less accurate at the extremes.
#Body fat calculator device skin
Usually you measure the thickness folds of skin at several different locations on the body and use a formula to calculate the percentage body fat. Traditionally, those of us without access to such testing facilities have used calipers to get skinfold measurements and calculate the percentage body fat from there. These are more convenient than having chemical analyses done on our dead bodies, but for most of us, these are out of reach. For many years, the “gold standard” was hydrostatic body fat testing by immersion (that is, weighing under water), but that has mostly given way to Dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA). The only truly accurate way is to do chemical analysis on a cadaver, but that’s damn inconvenient for most of us.

There are many different ways to measure your percentage body fat.
