Body composition - Body Fat Composition, Ideal Body Fat Percentage & tips to get Lean


Body Composition is a great tool to asses your health & fitness levels. It tells you the percentage of your body fat, muscle and bone mass. It also helps assess your Fitness training program. Use these simple tools to assess your body composition.

Importance of Body Composition Assessment

  • Its important to know your body composition because you want to lose fat and gain lean muscle and without prior knowing these values how can you accurately assess the results of your Fitness program?
     
  • Also since too much body fat not only looks bad and reduces your exercise performance it also is directly linked to heart diseases, diabetes and many health problems. {High body fat is a part of Metabolic Syndrome}.
     
  • Health Risk Screening - As obesity is now recognized as an independent risk factor for coronary artery disease, screening is done using abdominal girth and Body Mass Index to know the risk.

Although it is possible to measure around 30 components we will restrict ourselves ourselves to vital 2 components of fitness assessment.
 

Methods available for Body Composition Testing

  • Skin Fold Measurements
  • Hydrostatic Weighing
  • Bioelectrical Impedance
  • Dual Energy X-RAY Absorptiometry
  • Plethysmography

Since Hydrostatic Weighing, Bioelectrical Impedance and other methods are beyond the scope of this website, we will concentrate on Body Fat Testing using Skin fold calipers. Read more on Body Fat Testing - How to measure and Calculate your body fat here.


How to reduce Body Fat Percentage?

Aerobic Exercises are the best way to reduce your Body Fat and stabilize your Body Composition towards the ideal range. More on Aerobic Exercises here.

Also Weight Training helps build fat-free muscle mass and increase your resting metabolism. Your caloric intake is the caveat here. If aerobics is your short-term plan then weight training is definitely your long range goal to target.


Aging and Body Composition

Since there is a loss of muscle and bone with aging, there is considerable slowing of metabolism resulting in weight gain. Fortunately you can greatly delay or reduce these changes by weight training and aerobic training.

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The best way to get hold of your Body Composition and get a fitter and trimmer body is Burn The Fat Program By Tom Venuto.

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