Are you concerned about your body fat? If you are committed to fitness, you are probably interested in tracking your body fat, even if you are not actually fat. After all, you want to track your progress toward your goals, don’t you? That’s one of the rewards of working out regularly—meeting your goals.
The bathroom scale doesn’t lie, but it still can be deceptive. Your weight doesn’t tell you much about your overall fitness. Weight isn’t all that meaningful unless you understand how your weight is distributed—how much of your weight is muscle and how much is fat. After all, muscle weighs more than fat, so it’s possible to actually gain weight, as you get fitter. Not only that, but your weight tends to fluctuate throughout the course of the day. If you sleep, eat, drink a lot of water, sweat a lot… all these things will affect what the scale tells you.
How do you measure your progress, then? Aside from performance increases when you are working out, which is arguably the best way to measure your fitness performance, the solution is body fat calipers. Body fat calipers cost about $30 online. Body fat calipers measure subcutaneous fat. They’re pretty simple, really. You take a measure with the calipers and then a body fat percentage is calculated.
Ideally, your body fat should be within the low to average range for your gender and age.
When you measure your won body fat, you should bear in mind that body fat tables focus on norms. You should consider your measurements more in terms of your own progress than in terms of the tables. You should also be sure to take your body fat measurements at the same time every day. Don’t test immediately after you exercise or right after you eat. Take your reading immediately after applying the calipers, as a prolonged delay can throw off the skin fold measurement.
If you have made a commitment to yourself to get fit and stay fit, chances are you are aware that you don’t really need all the bells and whistles. Fitness accessories make exercising and tracking your progress more convenient, however. Although fitness accessories are inessential, they can make working out more appealing. Working out is all about making progress, and there are many fitness accessories that are made to track progress.
If you are going to get fit, you will need to be honest with yourself. You have to recognize when you are making excuses to avoid a workout. Some gadgets such as a nice gym bag can be useful in keeping your stuff dry after a workout, thus making working out feel more appealing. The ones that track your progress motivate you by measuring progress you can’t detect with the naked eye. Accessories that seem meaningless, or merely aesthetic, can make your workout more appealing and comfortable and therefore help keep you committed to working out. While you can work out without fitness accessories, they make your workout more enjoyable and your results more visible.
