In the quest for optimal health and wellness, understanding the intricacies of our bodies goes beyond mere numbers on a weighing scale.
Body composition is a critical yet often overlooked aspect of health assessments.
Testing body composition helps to shed light on the muscle, fat, bone, and water distribution that traditional weight measurements fail to reveal.
Assessing body composition is paramount for crafting personalised nutrition and fitness programmes, identifying health risks, and setting the foundation for informed lifestyle choices.
This article looks at the pro’s and con’s of body composition testing.
What are the benefits of body composition testing?
Body composition testing allows you to set goals and measure progress
How we feel is not always reliable feedback for measuring progress towards health, wellness, and performance goals.
Establishing a baseline of measurements and setting realistic goals that you can track against is important when it comes to measuring the success of the changes that you have made.
When assessing body composition, here are some of the main areas that you can look at, depending on the method that you use:
- Body Fat
- Muscle mass
- Water
- Visceral fat
- Phase angle
- Bone Mass
Choosing the right body composition testing method for what you want to assess is crucial. See our article on ‘a guide to body composition assessment methods‘.
Body Composition testing Provides data for nutrition, training, and lifestyle changes
Regular tracking can provide feedback that can objectively inform nutrition adjustments, from energy intake to macronutrient ratios.
As an individual progresses towards their goals, whether that be health or performance, the body will likely adjust to its new state and therefore regular adjustments may need to be made to ensure continual progression to achieve the desired outcome.
For instance, as weight loss occurs, energy expenditure will likely decrease. It may be necessary to adapt your training programme, make calorie and macronutrient adjustments or adjust other lifestyle habits to continue to see results.
This is where working with one of our weight loss and body composition specialists can really help. Not only can we track using our in-house body composition testing, we can also support you with the nutrition and lifestyle changes for you to achieve your goals.
Body Composition Testing can support athletic populations
Bodyweight to strength and power to mass ratios are critical in most sports as it will impact on areas such as speed and agility.
Ensuring the appropriate energy intake and macronutrient ratios is critical for optimising athletic performance. Adjustments which are small but necessary may be informed by tracking body composition of athletes.
Our Sports Nutritionists are on hand to create personalised nutrition and lifestyle changes to maximise your athletic performance.
Regular body composition assessments may also help to identify periods of over-training/under-recovery.
Body Composition Testing Can support muscle gain
Tracking lean muscle measurements can provide relative feedback to inform whether energy intake and protein intake are appropriate for reaching lean muscle gain goals.
Body Composition Testing is an Indicator of metabolic health
Tracking body weight alone may not provide adequate insight into metabolic health status.
Research shows waist measurements and waist to height measurements are strongly associated with metabolic risk, such as the development of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes.
Large amounts of visceral fat are associated with increased cardiac risk, type 2 diabetes, liver disease and cancer.
Members of our team specialise in supporting those with cardiometabolic conditions like type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance and cardiovascular disease. In most cases, optimising body composition is a crucial part of reversing cardiometabolic risk naturally.
Body composition Testing can support healthy weight loss
Body composition testing during a weight loss phase is important to ensure that you are also maintaining muscle mass while lowering body fat.
Periodisation of energy intake and diet breaks may be a useful tool to optimise and maintain progress, particularly those on long term weight loss journeys.
Determining when these diet breaks are appropriate and how the metabolism is responding to the diet can be further informed by tracking body weight and body composition goals.
Optimising body composition is far more important than reaching a so called “ideal weight” on the scale.
Body Composition Testing can support healthy weight gain
Tracking body weight, body fat and muscle mass measurements can inform decisions as whether energy intake is appropriate for weight gain.
Lower than optimal body fat levels can have a host of unhealthy effects: unhealthy eating habits and undernutrition, loss of energy and focus, increased stress and impaired immune system, abnormal hormone levels, loss of reproductive function, reduced bone health and increased risk of fracture.
Body Composition Testing can support healthy weight maintenance
Perhaps you have already reached your weight goal but it is early days – tracking body weight and composition can be a useful tool whilst you learn how to manage this new period of your health journey and assist with gaining confidence whilst maintaining at this body weight.
Cons of body composition analysis
Using body composition measurements as an indicator of self-worth
Depending on your personality, levels of stress and other factors and triggers, regularly measuring and tracking body weight and composition may feed into becoming overly reliant on them and assigning some form of greater meaning to them, potentially using them as an indicator of your self-worth.
If you have any tendencies that make you think you may be more vulnerable to this, then our team is on hand to support you with this.
Body composition measurements are not the only indicators of health and performance
Body weight levels, body fat percentage, muscle mass – are all great measurements providing some indication of your health and performance status. There are many other important and contributing indicators that need to be considered and some of which may not be so objective but equally important.
Top tip: track a combination of measurements (objective and subjective) and monitor them all together to gain comprehensive feedback on your progress towards your health and performance goals.
We offer a range of Functional Medicine Testing, including blood tests to use alongside body composition testing
Tracking can be unreliable
Depending upon who and what is measuring your body composition can dramatically alter body composition measurements.
Top tip: choose a reliable method and consider using a trained practitioner to measure your body composition. Equally as important, be consistent – so take measurements with the same tool, at the same time of day, using the same technique. This way you are comparing apples to apples.
We use the SECA mBCA 525 measuring device within our clinical practice. This was selected because of the independent research performed on this device, the repeatability and reliability studies as well as the overall correlation with all gold standard measurements of different areas of body composition.
May stimulate an unhealthy or outward looking focus
You many have a tendency towards overly focusing on body image already or you may find that tracking body composition triggers this.
If you’ve got any concerns around this, talk to one of our Nutritionists about it and it might be something that requires further self-examination. If body composition tracking is not for you there are other ways of tracking progress towards goals!
