How Technology Can Help To Measure Your Body Fat Percentage - 20 Minute Fitness Episode #069

On today's 20 Minute Fitness episode we'll dive right into a very useful and key indicator of your health & fitness, which is body fat percentage. After laying down the basis of what your body fat percentage is and why it is superior to, for instance, BMI, Charlie gets into how you can actually measure it. You'll learn about all sorts of methods, from more basics with greater margin of error to very futuristic and much more accurate ones. So press play now!
Three Things You Will Learn
1) The Simple Ways Of Measuring Your Body Fat Percentage
If you think that body fat percentage can only be calculated with super high-tech gadgets, you're wrong. There is a method that is accessible to virtually anyone with a measuring tape and an online calculator. Simply head to a website with a calculator, such as active.com, plug in your body data and let the magic happen. Now of course the downside of this method is the element of human error.
Getting a bit more techy and stepping up on the ladder of accuracy, you can download Body Barista from the App Store. This app tracks your body composition and muscle groups through the phone's camera using a patented technology. Listen to this week's episode to learn how Body Barista works and achieves its ± 5% accuracy!
2) The Handheld Devices
There are several devices out in the market, which use more scientific techniques to calculate your body fat percentage. One of the most well-known ones is the Omron Handheld Body Fat Analyzer. This very compact and easy-to-use device uses Bioelectrical Impedance Analysis to give feedback on your body composition. While it has many advantages, like its portability and low cost, this device has also been criticized for its low accuracy.
Another gadget that is built on a similar concept is the Skulpt Scanner. The Skulpt Scanner was founded by a neurologist at Harvard Medical School, who originally aimed at building a solution to track the progress of his patients with muscle disorders. So he built a device that uses Electrical Impedance Myography, which later on proved to be an effective method for everyday people to track their health & fitness.
Press play and find out more about both Omron & Skulpt and which one has been found to be more effective according to users!
3) The Future Of Tracking Your Body Fat Percentage
Lastly we arrived to a device that's more technical, quite futuristic and definitely has greater accuracy. ShapeScale is a first-of-its-kind 3D scanning body scale that tracks and visualizes the user's body composition. ShapeScale uses volume and weight measurements to calculate not only your overall, but also your localized body fat percentages.
Besides the detailed and accurate feedback, you also get access to your interactive and photorealistic  3D avatar and various cool features. These include the Heat Map, which uses color coding to show where you’ve been losing fat and/or gaining muscles, and a lot more...Tune in to hear all about the technology behind ShapeScale and what other features this magical device has to offer!