Body Fat

As normal my mind drifts while i am meant to be studying and i normally end up studying more fitness stuff than accountancy (whoops!) A very good website which you guys might want to check out: http://www.t-nation.com. It is more of a body building website but i feel there are still a lot of lessons that can be learnt from it. This is one of them:

Body Fat

Q: How low does your body fat percentage generally need to be in order to start seeing abs?

A: The magic number is 9.8%. Now, there are a lot of people who see imaginary abs, but one row doesn't count. The upper row of the abdominals can show up at 15%.

If you can see the linea alba (which means the "white line" ) — the vertical line in the middle of the rectus abdominis — that's at least 9.8%. In other words, you'd see all the rows.

I remember one professional baseball player in Sports Illustrated claiming to be 6% body fat. There was a picture of him in the article and he was more like 17%. At 6% you'd be able to see the guy's pancreas make insulin.

People like this are either delusional, using poor body fat measuring devices, or using a sloppy testing protocol. Those electrical impedance devices, the Bod Pod, etc. all tend to be quite inaccurate. If you're skilled with a pair of good calipers, you can be within a half a percent of a DEXA scan, which is now the industry standard.

The research and my experience shows that it takes about 4000 subjects before you're accurate with a pair of calipers. You just have to do a lot of them to develop the skill. When we teach Biosignature, we harp on the students all day on how to do it properly.

By the way, we're evaluating what could be the future of body fat testing right now: laser guns. Basically, a monkey could test body fat with this method. The only limiting factor is if the person can find the anatomical markers, but that's not that complicated. You point the gun and the laser measures the skinfold.

One of the problems with skinfold calipers is, how much do you pinch? This is especially true when dealing with the obese. People I deal with want to go from 12% to 5%, but some people are starting out at 40%! They're morbidly obese.

And here's something else to think about: ingesting a lot of trans fat changes the composition of body fat — it's harder to pinch. Ask any experienced tester. If you pinch test someone who eats a lot of French fries and chicken nuggets, his fat feels a lot different. So in that case, the tester has to be very skilled and have a kung-fu grip worthy of one leaving the Shaolin temple.

There's a reason why the medical division of the National Academy of Science says that the only safe level of trans fat is zero: it actually changes the cell structure. Our body doesn't know what to do with it.

Now, as far as what calipers are best, you need to spend $400 to $600. I like the Harpenden Skinfold Caliper.

This was written by a guy called Charles Poliquin.

Hope you lot find it as useful as me - dont forget; Knowledge is Power!

Sean

Excellent post. Everyone needs to read that shit