Body Fat Monitor As A Fitness Measuring Device

With the scales often not telling the real take and the BMI calculator often being an unreliable indicator of actual health of a person, a Body Fat Monitor is able to offer a more accurate picture of one’s fitness.

Body fat monitors are able to give you a more real picture of your health and fitness levels because they are different from your bathroom scale which cannot tell the difference between body fat and muscle.

body fat monitorSo when on a fitness program, a body fat monitor can help you gauge your progress more accurately.

How does a Body fat monitor work?

There are two main types of body fat monitors, one type that is rather like a bathroom scale and another that makes use of calipers to determine percentage of body fat.

The Bioelectrical Impedance Analysis (BIA) technology is used by a lot of these devices to calculate body fat.

Small electrical impulses are circulated around the body to find out what percentage of the body is fat and how much is muscle. It detects the water content in the body, which is what muscle and lean tissues are principally made up of.

A device such as this Tanita BF680W Duo Scale Plus Body Fat Monitor with Athletic Mode and Body Water available from Amazon, is a body fat monitor which claims to be able to monitor the fat and water percentages in the body.

It also tells you how many calories should be consumed in a day to maintain the current weight of a person. The device works by sending low level electrical signals through the foot pads to measure the body’s resistance to these signals as they travel through the body.

The calculations are done based on the gender, age and weight of the person, which are analyzed to arrive at the results at home.

The electrical impulses are low level and considered safe for most people, except perhaps those who have pace makers fitted for them.

This particular model comes equipped with memory that can remember the data of two people so that it does not have to be fed in each time.

This fat loss monitor also from Amazon, the Omron HBF-306C Fat Loss Monitor, works on the same principle; using the BIA technology to determine body fat percentage.

This body fat monitor is a hand held device rather than one that you stand on and delivers results in two modes – athletic (for more accurate results) as well as normal.

It can measure not only body fat but also the person’s BMI and is equipped with a nine person memory profile. It takes about 7 seconds to calculate offer results to the user.

The Fat Track Gold Digital Body Fat Caliper uses a rather different way of measuring body fat. It pinches the skin at three different points on the person’s body to calculate how much fat is carried.

Many find that this type of body fat monitor is rather less easy to use than the foregoing types; however this particular model has had consistently good reviews from experts.

This body fat monitor uses a patented technology called the Floating Code Thickness Measuring System which claims to offer 1mm accuracy.