Body Composition - challenging skimmed milk

Today’s company occupational health event featured some fitness tests, a walking test and the traditional Cooper Test, and three to four measuring points for various body health related checks. By far the best one was a body composition analyzer. You stand on it’s metal area surfaces as if it would be some scales and it measures an electrical current going through you. (For the electrical engineers among you, it actually measures the impediance, mine was 411 Ohm)

Anyway, the results were hilarious. Body fat was still somewhere above 12%, when we went last time measuring it a couple of years back together with a couple of friends from work. Fabien one of them, not working out regularly, but the more interested in dark chocolate had way better values, around 8%. These French must have a fat segregation mechanism inbuilt, they just don’t get fat, even when eating for hours, one could get jealous.

But this time around, with all this running, the own fat percentage has gone down quite a bit - to 3%. The guy who explained the results on the print out to the people taking the body composition analysis test, he couldn’t believe it and we re-did the test an hour later, pretty much the same results. I could wear a stamp on my forehead now “less fat than in milk”

Other interesting results from this measurement, two thirds are water only and that’s apparently a good value, should be somewhere between 50 - 65%. The basic metabolic rate, i.e. energy burned while sleeping is just above 2000kcal and the body’s metabolic age is around 20 (this measuring system has a limit to reduce max 15 years from the real age, so we hit the limit there). Well, there is a strong correlation with the results from any mental age test I’ve taken so far. A further argument in the same direction is that total weight equals on the print out fat mass + bone mass + muscle mass. That doesn’t leave too much room for brains, does it?

today’s training: 4,5km warm up, Cooper Test 3430m, 2,5km cool down, 10,5km altogether

Tags: body composition, fat burning