Body Fat % Calipers

YorriaRaine
YorriaRaine Posts: 370 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
I recently made an order on amazon for a Caliper to see what my body fat % is. I'm on a budget and I hear they are fairly accurate despite their price tag. (Not expecting it to be completely accurate of course).

Was wondering what the % of error was typically with them. Or if anybody else on here used them to estimate their body fat %.

Replies

  • JoeCampbell85
    JoeCampbell85 Posts: 140
    I use them every couple weeks. If you use them perfectly correct thent he % error is about +/- 3%. However, it's hard to use these perfectly everytime. It seems that self-testing will result in a larger error. It gets better with time and practice.
  • WBB55
    WBB55 Posts: 4,131 Member
    A tape measure costs about $1 and is fairly accurate. More accurate than calipers in poorly trained hands. If it were me, I'd use both to measure my fat%, and then average the two numbers to use as my working BF% guesstimate. If you're losing weight or gaining muscle, averaging the two methods should help you figure out if you're going in the right direction with your BF% numbers.
  • usmcmp
    usmcmp Posts: 21,219 Member
    I've had lots of practice with calipers over the last 2 years. I am still highly inaccurate taking my own measurements with calipers and fairly accurate on others (took me a long time to learn it though).

    Scale and tape measure (once a month) are good tracking tools and more accurate.

    Accuracy: http://weightology.net/weightologyweekly/?page_id=250

Categories