Is The Inbody Machine In The Gym Worth Using?
Many of you have seen an Inbody machine in your gym.
I'm sure you must have seen it the day you joined a gym. A trainer must have guided you to stand over the machine for a couple of minutes.
If you have not faced the machine yet then its not a thing you should be worried about. Inbody machines aren't a magical machine and sometimes it can stress you.
To keep you away from stress and getting the facts, this is a must-read article and you should share it with your gym friends.
What is an Inbody Machine?
The Inbody machine gives you detail about your weight, body fat percentage, muscle mass, body water, what part your body has fat or muscle, what you should do to burn your fat, whats your BMI, how many calories you should consume, etc. These are the major things you get to see on a piece of paper.
The numbers which you see are they accurate?
To be honest, No.
The concepts to burn calories mentioned in the Inbody are absurd.
Many folks opt for the InBody to measure their body fat percentage (BF%) but fail to understand the level of inaccuracy associated with it.
All body composition assessment tools are estimates and have limitations.
In my coaching experience, I’ve noticed the InBody BF% values can have a wide range of variability.
When InBody is connected to the gold standard criteria (4 compartment model), error rates have been shown to be as high as 3.7% on the group level and as high as 11.1% on an individual level.
Bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) was also shown to underestimate Fat-Free Mass (FFM) by as much as 6lbs.
There are many variables to consider when evaluating the accuracy of these types of measures. The primary measure being used has its own flaws, the specific model of InBody can change the accuracy, the characteristics of subjects being tested can vary widely, different prediction equations can have different levels of accuracy.
Drawbacks of Inbody machine:
- It cant tell you the exact number for your muscle mass, body fat, body water, etc.
- If you check the numbers before eating and after eating you will get a huge difference. After eating, measurements might upset you the most because the numbers for each category would go up.
- If you're dehydrated there would be a drop in your weight and FFM number.
- Weight is an important part of total body water. For the most perfect results, it’s better to remove clothing and ensure no food is ingested (and you’ve been to the toilet. i.e. with clothes body fat % will increase.
These are few drawbacks which can empower you that the numbers on Inbody are not accurate.
How accurate is the number then?
Well, to be honest, I don't know because it really doesn't matter in daily practice.
If InBody is the only assessment you have available use these points to ensure the most accurate readings:
- Always measure under the same conditions: in the morning, before eating or drinking anything and after going to the bathroom.
- Specific to InBody, measure less frequently. Since InBody has poor accuracy for detecting smaller changes, fewer testing points allow more accurate detectable changes.
Once again, don’t get dangled up on your specific BF% number.
Opt for any assessment you use or can adhere to track the changes over time and use it with other measures also like weight, girth measurements, performance and visual appearance to determine the actual changes taking place.
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