[quote]hawaiilifterMike wrote:
I got the idea from Shelby/Justin at Troponin Nutrition/Elitefts about going by pics. They do email consultations of client’s diet plans and make adjustments based on the weekly photos the clients submit. Of course, I am not an expert like they are, but I think for my purposes of only getting a six-pack (10% bodyfat) vs. their clients (3-5% body fat - for bodybuilding competitions) it does not take an expert eye to evaluate (myself).[/quote]
I have a lot of doubts about this method.
Now, while probably everyone has confidence in themselves in this sort of thing, I base my opinion of reasonable self-accuracy on having done hundreds of bodycomps by skinfold and having gotten, midway through that, to the point where my initial opinion was almost invariably reasonably close to what the calculation wound up showing. Not from pictures, but in-person viewing.
That doesn’t mean my eyeball opinion is necessarily accurate with regard to true amount of bodyfat, but at least it has been generally fairly accurate with regard to bodyfat as estimated by skinfold measurement.
But many other people’s estimations, I am not so sure about.
For example there was a thread here from a novice trainer who was quite overfat and had added almost no muscle. From his pics I am pretty confident of 30% bodyfat being a reasonable estimate – if anything, a low estimate.
Yet everyone else on the thread was practically howling that it would be foolish for him to worry about losing fat: he needed to bulk up!
Some even claimed that one of my posts, which used a figure of 30% bodyfat with reference to a given psychology, had no relevance whatsoever. Some, while expressing opinion that going past 20% bf is unreasonable, seemed to completely think that that had no application to this fellow as he just wasn’t that fat.
I mean this guy was way fat, but just about everyone on the forum who saw the pics and posted thought that he could afford to eat for mass and should not cut first. (Regardless that novices can typically lose fat and gain muscle as the same time.)
So either of two things is the case:
-
Lots of people cannot judge bf at all accurately from pictures (if granting I was right), or
-
A person with a pretty good amount of direct experience at it, getting feedback hundreds of times on whether his eyeball estimate was correct or wrong, can be severely far off.
Either way, there’s reason to have doubt about any given person’s ability to judge accurately by pictures.
Grossly qualitatively, yes… no one will mistake obese from ripped, or vice versa.
But for example, you had thought, from pics, your starting point was the same as CT’s starting point. That was not correct.
Taking some quantitative measurements will help guide you as to what is happening as well as give you means of some reasonable estimation of how far remains to go and how fast your progresss is towards attaining some given goal.
