Anyone used a body composition monitor?

mrk · 20 Sep 2018 at 11:15

I've been going to the gym to tone up for several months now, and only recently ramped up the routine and form for Callisthenics workouts. And now been looking at composition monitoring.

I go to two different gyms, the newest is a PureGym, open 24/7 and has a PT I like as he also does Callisthenics and core work as well as boxing (I do Kick Boxing once a week and am doing a UWCB event in December).

I used the PT's scales and got the following results:

Age: 34
Height: 5 ft 8"
Weight: 9.3 st
BMI: 19.6
Muscle mass: 8.4 st
Water: 68%
Body fat: 5.1 %
Metabolic age: 19 yrs
Average kcals burnt: 1582
Visceral fat: 1
Bone density: 6 lbs

The body fat percentage was most surprising! PT says given my results above, I can get away with using energy from junk foods and burning that off in the following day's workouts. I still need to eat 3100 cals a day to gain of course, but I don't want to body build, just become extremely lean and toned. My macros seem reasonable for my stats I think, but eating so many Gs in protein a day isn't easy unless I scoff on chicken for every meal!

I have been adding OM's serious mass shale to my diet as well, once or twice a day with 2 scoops (200g per shake), so that gives an additional 733 odd cals.

This is actually really fascinating stuff. Stuff that I never really paid attention to before as I never needed to.

Also it highlights just how varied the human body is, I need extreme amounts of cals and proteins per day to gain, and don't need to cut any fatty foods out of my diet at all. Whereas others need to do the direct opposite.

I think the Callisthenics training will definitely help me out with getting to where I want to be by year's end. It's hard, but really satisfying and enjoyable :cool:

mrk · 20 Sep 2018 at 12:47

9.3, the .3 matters!!!

But yeah, I'm giving myself a 12 week routine plan given what I've found out and will re-measure in 12 weeks and see the changes. I'm not expecting the body fat% to increase much though as I seem to burn off excess fat so easily.

mrk · 21 Sep 2018 at 14:27

It was using the Tamita segmented monitor which the PT uses day in day out. Having done some research it appears to be one of the better ones out there, but all the machines you grip the bar on and pull up then stand on the contacts too have varying degrees of accuracy yeah. He said in his experience, someone like me who is very lean to begin with before any workout training begins, he sees between 4 and 6% body fat. I suppose it's a decent way to get a baseline though, then track the change over time.

There isn't really a 100% accurate way to measure body fat either it seems, of all the methods, the most accessible is skin calipers, but they need to be used by an experienced person, and the person being measured needs to be in the same condition of fitness and nutrition during each measurement and be measured around about the same time each time for the results to be tracked fairly.

Just several weeks of upper body training alone I'm seeing noticeable differences in physique! I'm going to continue at it and do a before/after comparison.

I don't know if everything I'm doing right now is the correct routine, or the best for me routine, but when the PT sessions start, I'll know for sure!

mrk · 22 Sep 2018 at 00:50

!!! I won't be paying £250 a go for someone to tell me I'm very lean when I know I'm very lean

mrk · 22 Sep 2018 at 11:40

The last photo is more like 1-4%!

Jeff outlined the scales of % nicely in one of his blog posts at athleanx: https://athleanx.com/blog/workout-t...urce=youtube&utm_campaign=body-fat-comparison

I've ordered a basic skinfold caliper so will check when that arrives. Also I think my local Puregym is getting one of the BodyTrack monitors soon too so that will be better than any smart home scales I guess but this is mainly for tracking change over time as long as the skinfold caliper result is close enough to the electronic reading.