The Blurb:
My fitness has been assessed by W10 before and their attention to detail was impressive. On the previous visit they took a posture photograph, assessed my flexibility and went at me with the calipers to measure my body fat. So why the machine? Apparently it’s because of human error. Different trainers might pinch different amounts of fat, for example, so having a machine means the testing is uniform. It’s an innocuous little thing in the corner of the gym, which produces a spreadsheet of different information that is helpful to a trainer in working out your gym plan and food diet. You need more than scales as measuring weight alone is not an accurate indicator of fitness – some of that weight could be useful muscle, for example.
The Process:
Dead easy. You take your shoes and socks off and hold hand grips: the machine gleans information from the points where it meets your skin. If you’re a little shy about your body this will be good news as you won’t have to strip off to be assessed. The resulting spreadsheet gives measurement in bands so that you can find out if you’re within ‘normal’ ranges.
The Result
Some expectations were confirmed but there were a couple of surprises. I manage the gym about once a week and I spend most of my day hunched in front of a computer so my muscle mass was a little under. More working out was recommended, along with a tweak of my diet to provide more protein to build muscle. Having some chicken for breakfast was discussed, as was eating more often – to four times a day.
Normal range for percentage of body fat is 10–20 per cent and I was at the upper limit of that, which was a little hard to take. Similarly insulting was my total body water, which just scraped into the normal range even though I try really hard to get through a 1.5 litre bottle of water during the day. A knee weakened by an operation was confirmed by the ‘segmental lean’ result – I’m lighter on one side as the muscle has diminished slightly there.
The results also offer a concluding suggestion. For me it was to increase my muscle by about 6kg and lose about 3kg of fat, which made sense, although I’m begrudging the work I need to put in to achieve that. All in all, it’s pretty fascinating stuff and non-members can currently try it out for £25.
