When you think about losing weight, you must know that it is very important to calculate the body fat percentage. This is the quantity of fat you are holding on you and in fact it is more important than your overall weight. This happens because your current weight does not exactly reveal the level of your fitness. The body fat percentage is the quantity of body-fat-tissue as a fraction of total body weight.
Your body fat is usually measured with the help of the Body Mass Index, also known as BMI. The numbers are different for women and men. A woman needs to have a body fat percentage between 21 to 31 % to be in shape. A fantastic shape requires a body fat percentage around 10%. For men, it is required to have a body fat percentage range from 14 to 25% to be considered in shape and fit. An excellent shape requires a body fat percentage as low as 2%.
The easiest way to calculate body fat percentage is to write down how much do you weigh. Then, you must multiply your weight by 703. The next step is to write down your height in inches and multiply it by the same number. To obtain the Body Mass Index you need to divide the weight number by the height number.
There are numerous websites that offer some calculators in order for you to calculate the body mass percentage. You just need to introduce some information about you, like age and sex and the above measurements and the calculator will do all the work for you.
There are a lot of equations for approximating body fat percentage and they will give you rather dissimilar results. Even if you change programs or calculators that are using similar equations, you can obtain somewhat dissimilar results. This happens because various programs carry the decimal points out to various lengths or inconsistencies in the equations. So, you need to find one technique to calculate body fat percentage and stick to it.
You may wonder why these calculators include the age factor in their equations. By taking age into account, they try to balance for the fact that as your body ages it begins to retain intra-abdominal fat, to drop lean muscle, and also to lose some of the bone density. These changes are not quantifiable with your body fat calipers. The age factor which is included within the equations is not based on active trainers, but on normal people. Physical activity and particularly muscle training will cancel out the age element of that equation.
There are also other techniques to calculate body fat percentage. Among these we can count the bio electrical impedance analysis, which can calculate body fat in a couple of seconds and the Hydrostatic Weighing, which is considered to be the gold standard. It is a method based on Archimedes's Principle. The examiner initially calculates the body density by measuring the amount of water that you displace when entering a tank. After that, a specific equation is used to calculate body fat percentage based on the body density.
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