Posted on October 19, 2009 in Latest News
What are Body Fat Calipers?
Unlike the other bathroom devices or scales, which measure only the weight of a person. Body fat calipers evaluate the percentage of the fat present in body, bone, internal organs and muscles. This helps the person to understand his/her body composition.
By knowing the fat content in your body, you can focus on the right part. For example you measure your body fat, and come to know that your hips have heavy content of fat, so you can workout more on your hips, in order to get your body in proportion.
Why Body Fat Calipers?
There may be various fat measuring devices available in the market, but at the end, people would like to use the cheaper one’s, which gives more accurate results like the body fat calipers.
Electronic fat measuring scales may look more fancy and gives instant results. But they work using electrical impedance to calculate the percentage of the body fat, and generally electrolyte balance and hydration influence them. Hence they give inaccurate results.
The manual body fat calipers take bodily measurements, which do not consider any of the biological factors. These calipers come in a very cheaper price; they are lightweight and are easy to carry,
Some people don’t like their body weight or fat being measured by their gym trainers or a doctor or anybody else, so for them, there is no better device than calipers, as they keep their privacy to themselves.
How Accurate Are Body Fat Calipers?
Body fat caliper’s gives accurate results, when used correctly and consistently. An article published in “Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research” in the year 1998, compared a body fat caliper against a Lange multi-site caliper and the Futrex 1000 (NID) Near Infrared Device.
Measurements taken for 3 devices were again compared against “underwater” or hydrostatic weighing for accuracy. Considering the “gold standard” the researchers were surprised to see that the body fat caliper was perfect within ‘one percent’ of under-water weighing measurement.
The accu-measure calipers showed more accurate results than the complicated and unaffordable Futrex (1000) Near-Infrared Device. This was true for both men and women. This lead to overrate the percentages of body fat compared to under water weighing and fat calipers.
» Filed Under Latest News
Comments
Leave a Reply
