Body fat determination

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jbug100
jbug100 Posts: 406 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
At my gym, they have a gadget that estimates body fat percentage. You enter your age, height and weight, then you grip short handlebars, and it gives you supposed BF %. You are not standing on anything, just gripping the handles. Anyone know how accurate this gadget is. Frankly, I was disappointed with the number it gave me, so I would love for someone to tell me that It is a piece of crap:)

Replies

  • lawtechie
    lawtechie Posts: 708 Member
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    Fairly accurate for the way it calculates, which is putting a slight current through you. The one I took closely matched the scale I get weighed on within 0.5 %
  • Classalete
    Classalete Posts: 464 Member
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    I for one believe that they're about as useful as an ashtray on a motorcycle. They have them at my gym also and after using it 5 times consecutively the percentage varied as much as 6%.
  • texasro5e
    texasro5e Posts: 16 Member
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    Fairly accurate. I had that test as well as the VO4 which is suppose to be the most accurate and they were pretty much the same results.
  • yarmiah
    yarmiah Posts: 325 Member
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    A BodPod reading is pretty accurate, but can be costly if you want to know truer numbers. .
  • engineman312
    engineman312 Posts: 3,450 Member
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    yeah, it's probably not completely acurate, but its not far off either. i'm at like, 27% body fat. my goal is to bring it down to like 15%. best way to do that is with weights.
  • cschu544
    cschu544 Posts: 320 Member
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    It's incredibly accurate :( sorry. They say that's actually one of the best tools to use in calculating it. What it does is send a current through your body, it measure how fast that current gets through your body and to the other sensor.

    At least you know where you stand now! Good Luck!
  • Articeluvsmemphis
    Articeluvsmemphis Posts: 1,987 Member
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    It's accurate for the most part, but it can vary if you are 1: Too hydrated (like you down a bottle of water right before) or 2: Fairly dehydrated (like you woke up and haven't drunk anything at all)
  • embersfallen
    embersfallen Posts: 534 Member
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    was it an omron monitor? If you work out a lot, they should put you into the meter as athletic...that DOES change your BF percentage numbers.... I bought one from walmart awhile back to use @ home...and it was better with that rating... ;).....the instructions walked through how to determine which rating to go by :)
  • LisaKyle11
    LisaKyle11 Posts: 662 Member
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    i have one of those... bought it on Amazon for about $27 or so.... so far....fortunately or unfortunately i think they are pretty accurate. def not perfect, but a good gauge at least. mine ranges from 19-21%. just don't use them first thing in morning or any other time you might be dehydrated.
  • LeBlackstone
    LeBlackstone Posts: 26
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    BIA is garbage
    BIA can be problematic because it’s a prediction based off of a prediction, so the error gets compounded. When you look at group averages for BIA measurements, there tends to be bias, with BIA often underpredicting how much fat you have. As with other techniques, the individual error rates can get high, with some research showing error rates of around 8-9%. In fact, BIA doesn’t do much better than BMI at predicting body fat in some cases. When it comes to measuring change over time, BIA can often underpredict the amount of fat loss, and the estimated change can be off by up to 8%.

    http://weightology.net/weightologyweekly/?page_id=218

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