Be In the Know With In-Body!
Composition analysis is an effective tool in personal training.
For more than a century, Body Mass Index (BMI) has been universally relied upon as a measure of health and wellness. Invented nearly 200 years ago by Belgian scholar Adolphe Quetelet, BMI—calculated by dividing your weight by your height squared—is an outdated, limited metric with critical flaws. While perhaps slightly more useful than looking just at scale weight, BMI does not distinguish between excess fat, muscle, or bone mass, nor does it provide any indication of the distribution of fat within the body.
And when you step on a scale, you can’t see how much muscle or fat you have—all you see is a number with no context. So what does your weight really represent?
When it comes to assessing the impact of your fitness, nutritional, or lifestyle changes, there are other, more valuable indicators of progress—first and foremost of which is your body composition. Introduced as a concept in the early 20th century, body composition has been embraced in the last few decades by medical science as one of our most effective measures of body fat and overall health.
Defined simply, your body composition is the total amount of fat, muscle, bone, and water in your body. Body composition analysis goes beyond your weight and the traditional body mass index (BMI) to reveal your body’s proportions of fat mass (all the different fat in your body) and lean mass (muscles, bones, ligaments, tendons, internal organs—essentially everything in your body that isn’t fat).
Think about when you take your car into the shop for an inspection. In order to examine the condition of the car, the mechanic opens the hood, checks the fluids, and inspects the working components. Body composition analysis is the same idea, except instead of examining your engine oil level or testing the battery life, you are getting a measurement of your fat, muscle mass, and body water levels. By “looking under the hood” and understanding what areas you need to improve on in order to achieve a healthy body composition, you will look and feel so much better!
Here’s why it’s important to get body composition checkups at regularly scheduled intervals:
MEASURE YOUR PROGRESS. While a single body composition analysis will give you a solid understanding of where you’re starting, monitoring your body composition over time will reveal your progress. By tracking changes in fat and lean mass, you can assess what is working with your current fitness and/or nutritional strategy and make tweaks accordingly.
CATCH UNWANTED CHANGES. Keeping an eye on your body composition lets you spot unwanted changes, such as unnecessary fat gain, muscle loss, or bone density loss. Through routine body composition checkups, you can catch these negative developments while they are minor. This allows you to make changes to your lifestyle before small, unwanted changes balloon into much larger problems—like chronic illnesses.
SET ATTAINABLE TIME-BOUND GOALS. After embarking on a new fitness and nutrition plan, measuring your body composition will give you a sense of the time it takes for your body to make the changes you want. Armed with information, you’ll be able to set attainable health and weight optimization goals within an appropriate time frame.
Bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) is a method for measuring body composition, including muscle mass, body fat, and total body water. Alternating low and high-frequency electrical currents are sent through the water in the body via contact with electrodes to measure impedance. The impedance is used to determine total body water (TBW), which can then be used to derive your fat-free mass—the portion of your body that does not contain fat, including your muscle and bone—and finally, body fat.
The most popular and most accurate BIA machine is InBody. Go beyond the scale with this a non-invasive, quick, and accurate body composition analysis that provides a detailed breakdown of your weight in terms of muscle, fat, and water. Your comprehensive yet easy-to-understand measurements will display on an InBody Result Sheet quickly.
The goal for most people is to decrease body fat and increase muscle mass. Most people know that we should focus on proper nutrition and exercise. The challenge is where to begin. Begin in the know: As part of your initial complimentary consultation at Success Studios, you’ll be able to take an InBody test, so we both can get to know your body, inside and out. We are excited to add this tool to our Ivy Road location and to continue using it at our North location!
The information is invaluable for our trainers to be able to design a personalized program so you can get the results you want. Your body composition can then be re-checked every few months to see your progress and make training adjustments should they be needed.
To schedule a Complimentary Assessment and inBody test, click on the button below.
If you’re a current client email your location Ivy Road or North to schedule your scan! These Inbody scans typically take 15-30 minutes and should not be performed after exercise sessions.