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Hey all..got my stats analyzed by this machine at my gym Goodlife Fitness. My question is how accurate do you think it is? It seemed to simply be a scale with height and body type estimated. He put me at 5'8 and I may be half a foot shorter. Also he put my as Athletic as body type but I'm skinny fat. Here are the exact details of the printout. I think my body fat % is higher due to my gut but I am in my 4th week on this program and getting great strength gains and fat loss already. Anyways if I'm really 11.5% fat then how low until I see abs!!! Thanks for any replies.

Body Type: Athletic
Gender: Male
Age: 33
Heith: 5ft 8in
Weight: 161lb
BMI: 24.5
BMR: 7175 kJ/ 1715 kcal
Impedence: 481 Q?
Fat%: 11.5%
Fat Mass: 18.6lb
FFM 142.4lb
TBW: 104.2lb

Outbound wrote:Hey all..got my stats analyzed by this machine at my gym Goodlife Fitness. My question is how accurate do you think it is? It seemed to simply be a scale with height and body type estimated. He put me at 5'8 and I may be half a foot shorter. Also he put my as Athletic as body type but I'm skinny fat.

You may be half a foot shorter?! And you let him put in all these inaccurate stats and you accepted the result? No offense, but I hope you didn't pay extra for this. If you did, I would go back and demand that he measure you accurately and redo the test. There's no point in going to the trouble to get tenth-of-a-% precision if it's not accurate to within that precision, if that makes sense. Ask him what the body type options are and then tell him what you'd like him to put.

My husband and I have a Tanita body fat scale at home, and our conclusion is "hos up, bros down". Which is to say, based on our own readings, we're of the opinion that it measures guys too low and gals too high on the body fat percentage. The reason for this is clearly because the impedance measurement is done by foot pads, and women generally carry their fat closer to their feet than do men. I'm visibly solider and more muscular AND lighter than last year, and it measures me at about the same bf% (moreover, based on measurement, my hips haven't gotten smaller-- dammit!). He's doing less cardio and is slightly less well-defined than last year, and it reports him as a slightly lower %. Go figure.

Get a DEXA scan, bod pod, or hydrostatic measurement as a baseline and then forget about it until your next measurement; for example, repeat the same method in 4-6 months and compare the result. As far as I can conclude, anything less is purely for entertainment purposes, like peeing on ketostix.

Ya it was free...and speedy as they guy just threw me on there lol. I'm probably closer to 5'8 than 5'7 & 1/2 and not sure how body type affects the reading either. I suppose I can keep the same settings for next reading just for comparison reasons. So is there anything with this machine that is actually measuring the fat on the body or is just estimating based on weight??? BTW I'll look into the other methods, thanks for the response.

Outbound wrote:Ya it was free...and speedy as they guy just threw me on there lol. I'm probably closer to 5'8 than 5'7 & 1/2 and not sure how body type affects the reading either. I suppose I can keep the same settings for next reading just for comparison reasons. So is there anything with this machine that is actually measuring the fat on the body or is just estimating based on weight??? BTW I'll look into the other methods, thanks for the response.

OK, there's a big difference between half an inch shorter and half a foot shorter! Yes, I think half an inch is probably just fine. As for the actual measuring or not, were there metal pads that you had to stand barefoot on, or anything metal for you to grab your hands on? If so, it was using bioelectrical impedance to measure proportions of your body more or less resistant to current flow. I'm not sure whether it's muscle or fat, but whichever one holds less water is more resistant to current flow. So if you have more resistance, less water is present. I think that means you have less muscle, but I've probably got it backwards. The one thing I'm sure of is that more water means current flows easier because it's a good conductor.

If there's nothing metal measuring the bioelectrical impedance, then it's probably doing some kind of BMI estimation, in which case, I would consider it worthless. My current BMI is under 22, but I bet you I'm still over-fat, despite being in the "normal" BMI range, whatever that signifies. At the individual level, it signifies nothing. It's a statistical tool developed over a hundred years ago by a Belgian physicist/astronomer who empirically observed a general trend that in "normal" builds (again, whatever that means) the weight is proportional to the square of the height, and it was used to make predictions about whole populations, not individuals. Again, I find that it's purely for entertainment purposes.

The Omron HBF-500 at my gym, if you put in the correct age, sex, and weight status, is within 0.5% of the reading from a Bod Pod right now. Dunno if it's the "even a stopped clock is right twice a day" thing at work there, but I'll be checking again in 3 months when I do my next Bod Pod evaluation to see how close it is then at lower body fat.

--Matt B.

redgiki wrote:The Omron HBF-500 at my gym, if you put in the correct age, sex, and weight status, is within 0.5% of the reading from a Bod Pod right now.

Yeah, but it's got foot and hand B.E. impedance pads, so I'd expect it to be more accurate than one without the pads. Betcha after 2 or 3 bod pod comparisons if it's still within .5% it'd be a worthwhile tool for trend analysis as you progress. Wonder if I could get my FIT-test guys to let me just pop in once a week to use their BF scale with the hand grips instead of paying for a whole scan complete with DEXA...

I've got a Tanita scale and I've read that they're notoriously inaccurate (regarding measuring body fat percentage). I mean, if it was truly "scientific," then why would age matter? If I'm the same person... but program in different ages, the scale will give me two different results. That tells me that the scale's computer is "guessing"... not measuring.

From what I've read, these scales are good enough to tell you whether your body fat is going up or down (and I even doubt that a little), but, otherwise, they are not too accurate.