“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” - Peter Drucker
For those who don’t know, Peter Drucker was a management consultant whose writings contributed to the philosophical and practical foundations of the modern business corporation. His work is especially revered in Japan, where his thoughts on management were used to great effect to build Japanese industry after WWII.
Edit: per wiki: His work is especially popular in Japan, even more so after the publication of “What If the Female Manager of a High-School Baseball Team Read DruckerÃ??Ã?¢??s Management”, a novel that features the main character using one of his books to great effect, which was also adapted into an anime and a live action film.[25] His popularity in Japan may be compared with that of his contemporary W. Edwards Deming
I’ve been meaning to put my thoughts down on paper for a while now, and was motivated to after reading a recent article by Chris Colucci. While this post isn’t meant to be a refutation of what he wrote, my own post will generally mirror the points brought up in his article for two reasons: first, he covers the most common, salient points and secondly, I’m an awful writer with a small mind and structuring my writing vis-a-vis Chris’s article helps me organize my thoughts.
First, a bit about me. I’m in my early 40s with a desk job. I come from a competitive endurance sport background and have (had) the typical runners build as well. After never having lifted weights in my life, I stepped into a weight room at age 37 weighing around 160lbs at 5’11". Luckily, I never wasted time following the routines found in the pages of Muscle and Fitness.
For the first year, I did SS then progressed to 5/3/1 and am currently doing a modified iteration of 5/3/1. I’ve always had squats, deadlifts, rows, and presses in my routine often using OHP instead of BP and front squats instead of rear squats. I’m a data junkie and enjoy seeing changes over time expressed in numerical ways. I also love puppies, chocolate, longs walks on the beach and hate mean people.
The most common method of measuring body fat that doesn’t involve plugging measurements into an online calulator involve caliper and taking skin fold measurements at up to 9 sites (Parillo) or as little as 3 sites (Jackson/Pollack 3). Now, let’s say I wanted you to measure your waist for a pair of pants and handed you a piece of elastic of indeterminate length. I tell you that, with some amount of tension on the elastic it will measure 34" long. The problems are immediately evident.
The tool, in this case the elastic, is unsuitable for the job because it is inconsistently inconsistent and too dependent upon the person doing the measuring. You might hold the elastic very loosely while I pull it very taut. Calipers suffer from the same flaws. You measuring yourself in your bathroom won’t yield an accurate measurement. Neither will letting your girlfriend measure you. Not even the personal trainer down at the gym, most likely.
First, the plastic calipers are garbage. Next, the expensive, metal calipers are often used incorrectly. In the right hands, calipers can be accurate but this is rarely done in my experience and involves a process I go into at the end of this post. My point is to dismiss calipers as a viable method of body fat percentage measurement. I would note that pictures of one’s self and measurements using a tape measure suffer from some of the same problems and are therefore just as ineffective as calipers.
We currently have 3 generally accepted ways of getting an accurate body fat percentage: hydrostatic testing, Bod-Pod, and the current gold standard, DEXA. Given that we can get an accurate measurement, the argument against knowing one’s %BF because it’s too inaccurate falls by the wayside.
We know that we have the technology, so what is the importance of actually knowing the number? I think there are three reasons:
To assess incremental changes in diet or training;
To compare one’s physique or strength levels over time, and;
To assess one’s general health level and propensity for disease especially those that show a correlation to high %BF.
My first point came to when while reading a piece by CT in which he called the range of body fat from %12 - %18 the “dead zone” or something similar. For me, it’s closer to %14 - %20 but essentially he said you can move about through this range and not really see any changes to your body. I would also add that what changes you can see are easily masked by bloating, general water retention, or local edema (“the pump”). So you could make a change to training or diet on January 1, but 3 months later not necessarily know how your body is responding. I believe this is especially important for the physique athlete preparing for a show as time is a valuable commodity.
This is my personal experience: From September through December of 2011, I kept a food log. I averaged around 2600 calories a day and saw my weight increase up to 210 lbs. On January 1, 2012 I decided to start a low carb diet eating less than 30 net carbs per day. I lowered my calories by 100 per day as well. Everything else was kept constant, or as constant as life would allow. In mid-April, I weighed myself again and my results weren’t that impressive at all, around 9 pounds over the course of 13 weeks. Very underwhelming.
The visible changes were lackluster as well. I wore the same pants, all my shirts still fit, no flattering comments from my GF. It would be easy to say that I should look for another way to lose weight or gain lean mass, as those were my goals. However, look at my DEXA below. My %BF went from 23.4 to 16.4. More importantly, while I lost 18 pounds of fat, I gained nearly 7 pounds of lean mass! Had I not been able to accurately measure my body fat percentage, there is no way I could have known this. I likely would have changed my diet and/or my training and missed the fact that I was actually making terrific progress.
My second point is one of personal opinion. While I look for absolute increases in strength, because I also value aesthetics (in other words, IÃ???Ã???Ã???Ã???Ã??Ã?¢??m a vain bastard) it’s important that increases in strength not come at the expense of my gut. Referring back to CT’s “Dead Zone”, it’s easy for me to unknowingly travel up from %13 to %20 at which point I would tap the brakes a bit and do some minor damage control on the fluff that begins to accumulate.
In my experience, it much easier to stay within range than get myself back down once I’ve moved north of %22. The problem is I don’t realize I’m north of %20 until it’s too late. At that point, it’s like turning an oil tanker, I do believe that the body develops some kind of momentum both to the upside and downside and changing that momentum can be more difficult than merely adding or subtracting the requisite calories.
Lastly, I’m at a point in my life now where my overall health takes greater precedence. There are, indisputably, diseases that show a positive correlation with %BF. Does being %14.9 protect you from all disease and %15.1 doom you to an impending coronary event? Absolutely not. But as I pointed out before, my %15 doesn’t look a lot different than my %22. And there is a difference in risk between those 2 levels of fat-itude.
Many of you are aware of so called “heart attack fat”, also know as android. You can see that after my dietary changes, my android fat dropped from %31.3 to %20.5, or by a third. I absolutely believe that this is a healthy change, and one I would have been unaware of without accurate body fat testing.
Immediately after posting this, I’m going to post 2 images. The first is of my comparative DEXA scans. The information should be self-explanatory once you get the hang of the layout.
The second is from the Performance Lab of a local university. I made an appointment to get hydrostatically tested, and the guy performing it was working on a Masters in Kinesiology. Before I was dunked, he performed a 6 site caliper test on me. He measured between each joint, found the halfway mark, then measured it with the calipers.
He then took a second measurement, averaged the 2, ran them through the formula and got a %BF of 16.8. My hydro test came back with a result of %16.94, lol. He said he had performed thousands of caliper tests and this was the closest he ever came. My knowledge of the pitfalls of caliper testing comes from my discussions with him.
TL:DR Accurate body fat measurements allow the intermediate to advanced trainer to monitor incremental changes in diet and/or training in a more precise way.
