Page 54 - Muscle & Fitness (February 2020)

T R A I N T R A I N I N G M E T H O D S

5 WAYS TO

TEST YOUR

BODY-FAT

PERCENTAGE

With more and more
options for body-fat

testing now available,

we tell you which ones
are worth your time.

ant to shed some fat?
“Ditch your scale” is the
oft-repeated advice from
fitness pros. No matter
W how accurate, they say, a
scale tells you only how much
you weigh—it says nothing about
what that weight consists of.
If you’re a 6'2", 225-pound man,
for example, you could be a well-
fed couch potato or you could be
Arnold Schwarzenegger on the
Mr. Olympia stage in 1974.
The lesson: The scale doesn’t

mean much.
What does matter—whether
you’re seeking improved health, a
better physique, or both—is what
you’re made of: how much of you
is muscle, bone, skin, and other
lean tissue, and how much is fat.
More important, how are those
numbers changing over time?
To discover that crucial infor-
mation, you need a body-compo-
sition test—a tool that indirectly
estimates body fat and lean tissue.
(The only direct way to measure
these things is dissection, which
we don’t recommend.)
Right now, there are numerous
such tools available. Here’s our
breakdown of the pros and cons of

the most common approaches.

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