manumanu

see subject. I've heard of pinching your stomach and the no. of inches of fat meaning something....?

mtsgsd

You need a set of calibrated calipers to do this. You measure a fold of skin from several areas, I can't remember where or how to translate the measurements. Only trouble is that it doesn't really work if you are significantly over-weight. The only truly accurate measurement is a volume displacement test where they dunk you in a water tank and see how much volume you displace.

The calipers can be found in health or fitness stores sometimes or online.

H12

There's a trainer/medic/whatever-ya-wanna-call-him on our football team, and last year there was a type of scale he let alot of the team use. The scale looked just like a scale you'd stand on to decide your weight, but this was for body-fat percentages. I don't even know how exactly it worked, but you had to put all your weight on your heels on two certain spots, and it seemed fairly accurate. I don't know if it's cheap or expensive, or even availible to the public (though it most likely is), but it was really cool.

__________________
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit."
--Aristotle

Mael

the scale he's talking about above does it though "bio-electrical impedence" or soemthing like that. essentially, it weighs you, and then shoots an electrical impulse through you, and based on the time it takes to get back to the pad, plus weight, gender, age, etc, uses an equation to figure out your body fat percent. it has to do with the speed electricity passes though water and how much water makes up (or doesn't) fat tissue. that's a general idea, not necessarily 100% correct.

hilbert25

There's a few ways, which are somewhat accurate, but it takes someone who really knows what they're doing, otherwise it's +-10%. In one method they see how wide skin folds are compared to height, weight, age, sex, etcetera and look it up in a table. Another involves a scale with electric pulses. The third, and most fun, is water displacement. How much you weigh on land, vs. how much you weigh in water (fat floats). The most accurate of those should probably be water displacement, but it's the hardest to do, due to air in lungs, blood volume, etc.

If you want it just once out of curiosity, go to sharper image, or bed bath and beyond, both of which have the scales, and try it out.

Stinky Pee

I own one of these bio-impedence scales and have found them to be moderately accurate: definately not accurate enough to jusitfy the 80 bucks I spent on it. Your best bet is to call a few health clubs and ask them if they do the testing. Essentially the machines they have do the same thing, but are more precise.

__________________
Eat my fuck.

numist

as far as the caliper way to do it, you measure in at least 3 different places - belly, elbow/forarm, and somewhere else, and there is a chart that has the thickness, the area, and the body fat % for that area, then you do a little quick math and get your answer

careful though, if your below 5% or so (like I am) then results become inconclusive, but overall it works as an estimate. The electronic scales are more accurate, claiming within a fraction of a percent in some cases. They work by treating your body as a resistor in an electric circuit and measuring your resistance, because fat conducts electricity differently than muscle, bone, etc. By combining this info with your height, sex and age, it can give you a good idea of what your percentage is.

I used to work at performance bike shops and I know we had some on display there for people to try out, so you can find out by just calling a sports shop and asking if they have one, and if you can test it (then claim that its calibrated wrong because you swear you are (x-10)% body fat :P )

hope that helps