Interesting Conversation with a Personal Trainer

[Amanda131 214]

Hi all-

I saw a personal trainer at Lifetime Fitness for a free session that I earned for my one year anniversary with the club. These guys are pretty well-informed (they only hire Bachelor's and higher degrees). Anyway, she took my bodyfat measurement using 7 sites for analysis. According to the trainer, I currently have approximately 40% body fat. In order to be at what she considered a healthy body fat, she wanted me to get down to 20% which would put me at about 190 lbs. This really surprised me.

I know measuring body fat with calipers isn't an exact science but she really seemed to know what she is doing. I am now really interested in the Bod Pod Diva wrote about in another post. It was surreal for a toned, buff trainer to tell me that she would aim for a body weight on me of 180-190 and no less. Oh yeah, she really dug the sleeve eating, Vitamin supplement and excercise plan. I never thought I'd see a trainer and have them tell me I was on the right path. Very cool.

Anyway, any thoughts on the 180-190 weight goal? I'd just assumed that I should shoot for a healthy BMI so this is really throwing me for a loop. For information purposes, I am 5'9", currently 233, in a size 16 and a well proportioned hour glass figure.

All thoughts appreciated!

Amanda

[Cheryl 1]

Hi, Amanda,

I know that it has been a long time since you posted it but I just found it. I was wondering if you have been able to do the Bod Pod. It is so much more accurate than most other tests to figure out what you should way. I'm 5'8" and only have to get to 185 lbs to be at 25% body fat. Once I get to that weight (around another 20lbs) I'll redo the BodPod and see how I feel/look. These last 20lbs have been a struggle but I know I need to clean up my diet. Good luck. BTW, your trainer may not be far off if you are muscular.

[Raine 170]

I have a free session with my a trainer at my gym. I might just take them up on it.

[RickM 1,753]

I routinly use a body comp scale but will do a hydrostatic (dunking) or bodpod when I get into my goal range as a comparison. I would take any of these measurements with a few grains (or even kilos) of salt after massive weight loss, including the caliper measurements. The all take measurments and then compare them to some population norms to arrive at their composition figures, and that is fine if you are, say, 190 lb having gained some over time from an ideal weight of 160; however if you are that same person at 190 but who is down from 350, your body compostion is different than in the first case - you probably have some amount of excess skin hanging around that the population norms don't adequately account for.

I did a dunking a few years ago after losing about 50 lb from my high weight over 2-3 years (but was still a BMI of maybe 36 or so.) The test came back as a BF% of about 34, which correlated well with our Tanita body comp scale. However, my wife had the same test done after losing around 200lb from her DS and she was also reading about a 34% BF from the dunking, versus a mid 20s BF% on the Tanita. There is no way that she had enough fat on her to be 34% (though women are normally higher BF% than men, she doesn't/didn't have much fat in the areas where normally healthy women carry their fat, so it is likely that the Tanita was a more accurate reading in her case. It seems that when taking the volume measurement (the Water, or air in the bodpod, displacement measurement) that the excess skin is treated more like fat than lean mass despite that skin being mostly lean tissue) I want to get her checked again now that she has had reconstruction and has lost most of that hanging excess to see how well the numbers correlate. This is certainly something to ask if you can find someone who is very knowledgeable and experienced with this testing that may have some insight into this - the techs that usually do the tests tend to know little more than how to operate the machine. A physical trainer who has good experience with rapid weight loss patients may have some insight into how to correct the caliper readings for our case that a typical gym PT wouldn't have.

Is the engineer in me who is always suspicious of measurements showing through? (LOL) In any case, we are getting healthier, and it's good to get some different measures of how our bodies are improving, but shouldn't agonize over the numbers too much.

[Thomas CPA 496]

My trainer uses a hand held device that sends a signal through the body. Currently at 23% down from 30% a year ago.

[RickM 1,753]

My trainer uses a hand held device that sends a signal through the body. Currently at 23% down from 30% a year ago.

Sounds like a variant of the body comp scales that use electrical impedance to derive the composition figures. That might take care of one of the weaknesses of the scales - namely that they mostly measure lower body composition since it measures between your feet. That means that apple shaped people (mostly men) who keep their weight high around their bellies tend to have understated fat % on the scales while those who are pear shaped (mostly women), holding their fat around their butts and thighs, tend to be overstated. That may be part of the correction that my Tanita does (or attempts to do) when it considers gender in its calculations.

In any event, it's going down, and that's the important part. I'm down from about 42% to 24-25% by its measure now.