Body Composition

It is very important to understand body composition and what your personal body composition is. It is used to describe the percentages of fat, water, muscle mass and bone mass that make up your body. Two people of exactly the same height and weight could look completely different due to their body composition.

Healthy Fat Percentages
Women

Age-------Healthy Fat %
20-40---------21-33%
41-60---------23-35%
61-79--------24-36%

Men
Age-------Healthy Fat %
20-40--------8-19%
41-60--------11-22%
61-79---------13-25%




A great tool to help you recognize and monitor your health and fitness goals is a body composition monitor. These monitors look like a fancy scale that has the capability of measuring your body fat percentage, body water percentage, muscle mass, visceral fat rating (belly fat), basal metabolic rate (BMR) and bone mass. As you diet and exercise you might expect to lose weight when in fact you might gain weight due to an increase in muscle. This is why your average bathroom scale is not sufficient to monitor your health.

The body composition monitor uses bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) which occurs when an electrical impulse is passed throught the body, carried by water and fluids. The electric impulse passes through different tissues at different resistances and can measure the amounts of those tissues fairly accurately.

A body composition monitor trusted by doctors and athletes is made by Tanita and is sponsored by Iron Man as well. Tanita offers a variety of different monitors with different features according to your needs. This tool will help tremendously in monitoring your health and fitness progress.


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