Beyond the Scale: The Controversial Test That's Changing Fitness Forever (Body Composition Tests - are they worth it?)

Have you ever wondered how to go beyond the numbers on a scale?

Unlock the secrets to mastering your fitness journey with our latest episode, in which we explore the nuances of body composition tests.

We'll break down the science to reveal how these tests offer detailed insights into bone density, muscle mass, unhealthy fats, and water content. Join us as we compare the pros and cons of MRI and DEXA scans—two gold standards in body composition measurement.

You'll hear our anecdotes and tips to understand the practicality, cost, and accessibility of these methods, empowering you to make well-informed decisions on your path to better health.

In the second part, we focus on the accuracy of bioelectrical impedance testing. We'll emphasize the critical role of consistent testing conditions, such as hydration levels and the time of day, to ensure reliable results.

Are you curious about tracking body fat?

We'll share our experiences with Tanita scales and the importance of averaging weekly results for a more accurate baseline. 

Discover the benefits of in-body scan machines, which provide detailed segmental analysis, helping you identify muscle imbalances or the lingering effects of past injuries. Finally, we'll introduce you to the Bod Pod method, an incredibly efficient and precise way to measure body volume and density through air displacement. 

Get ready to transform your fitness journey with insights that offer a comprehensive look at what your body is truly made of.

Chapters

• 0:04 Understanding Body Composition Tests
• 10:55 Analyzing Body Composition Measurement Methods

Transcript

Dai Manuel: 0:04

Hey there, 2% Collective. Welcome back to another episode of the 2% Solution. I'm your host, di Manuel, and today we're going to break down something that might seem a little complex, but it's super important for anyone serious about their health and their fitness journeys. Today we're going to talk about body composition tests. Now, these are specifically devices that are great at not just telling us how much we weigh and body sizes and just our mass, but it actually gets right down to the nitty gritty and lets us know about. Well, what's our bone density? Do we have any imbalances muscle mass wise? Are we carrying any extra of that unhealthy fats you know, the brown fats subcutaneously lining our organs right down to how much muscle mass, how much water content do we have and how much density of bones do we have. So it really gives you a good overview of all the little insights that your body probably wants to tell you, but maybe we just aren't able to detect it with the types of scales that we use today. So I'm going to dive into some of these really cool devices and different ways of testing that I know. Once you establish a starting point, you now have something concrete that you can compare to as you progress along your own health and wellness journey, because you know, if you're not tracking, you can't change it. Right, what we don't measure, we can't change, as they say. So, specifically, the differences we're going to talk about today are between MRI, dexa scans and a bunch of other body comp tests. And if you've ever wondered what these tests are, how they work or why they even matter, well, this episode's for you. So let's get at it.

Dai Manuel: 1:49

What are body composition tests? Right, let's talk about that first. These tests they help us understand what our bodies are made of. I mean, it's more than just weight, right? You've heard me say that before. We're more than just a number on the scale, and I hope you believe that, because I know, back in the day I just I got really fed up with my scale. I really did. I just I just stopped using it and cause I just found that the number was constantly fluctuating give or take five, six pounds daily, and that's pretty common. You know, for a guy of my size, it's not a huge swing. You know, I'm 215 pounds, six foot one, I'm a really big dude and I got some good muscle mass on me, always looking at this number, just yo-yoing. So I just stopped measuring until I discovered body composition testing, because now I could really gauge my progress and figure out where I was making progress. But where wasn't I, where was I stalled? And these tests basically help us understand everything that our bodies are made of. The number on the scale doesn't tell the whole story If it doesn't differentiate between fat mass, muscle mass, bone density or water weight. There's opportunity to find something better, and that's where body composition tests come in. They give us a much clearer picture of what's happening inside our bodies.

Dai Manuel: 3:04

So let's start with the two gold standards. They're the most common, but, more importantly, why they're common? But really in medical applications or commercialized environments? Because you often have to pay for these types of tests and most people don't have an MRI machine or a DEXA scan machine sitting on their own. I mean, that would be really cool, but I live in a condo. Let's talk about these two. You know the two most reliable methods for measuring body composition is MRI and DEXA scans. Now, these are not the same thing, so understanding the differences will help you decide which one is right for you.

Dai Manuel: 3:36

So let's start with MRIs magnetic resonance imaging. It's typically known for its use in medical imaging to view organs, tissues inside the body, but it can also be used to measure body composition. And, fortunately for me, they got me into an MRI within 48 hours, which was great because we knew exactly where the problem was, where it was aggravating and, ultimately, where we needed to focus the attention of the other practitioners to help me through it. It was nine months, but hey, you know what? According to that doctor, I wasn't gonna be able to lift again. And I don't know if you've followed some of my posts on Instagram. I'm putting up some numbers. I'm getting back to sort of like the weights I used to lift back in my late twenties, early thirties. And here I am, late forties and actually stronger and fitter than I've ever been. So, yeah, anyways, I digress. The big advantage with MRIs is it provides highly detailed images as well, showing not just how much fat and muscle that we have, but exactly where it's located. Now, according to a study published in Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging I have linked it in the show notes MRI is considered the gold standard for accuracy, especially when we're assessing specific body areas in detail.

Dai Manuel: 4:51

Some people will go in for an MRI scan. They might just get their chest scanned or an arm scanned or a leg scanned, and often when we go in for body comp testing it's a full body scan takes a lot longer and you usually have to be prepared to invest a bit more as well. Body scan takes a lot longer and you usually have to be prepared to invest a bit more as well. Mri scans can be quite expensive. All right, they range from several hundred bucks to over a thousand dollars, depending on the facility and the region that you live in. Like, if there's not many MRI machines around and you only got access to a couple, they're obviously going to charge a lot more for it out of that convenience factor.

Dai Manuel: 5:23

So do look into that, you know, and assess access to MRI for body composition analysis. It will probably be limited. We often find them in hospitals and at least up here in Canada. To get an MRI you have to have a referral from a GP or another doctor and even then you might have a wait list of six plus months. I swear they're still catching up after COVID just because there's not a ton of those machines around, based on the expense of them. But if you can get access to one, they're super cool and they really are great for diagnostic purposes, but you know, it may not be something that's feasible to continuously use for body composition testing. So yeah, unlike DEXA scans, which can make scheduling and accessibility challenging you know, that's where MRIs are a problem DEXA scans, which can make scheduling and accessibility challenging you know that's where MRIs are a problem. Dexa not so much.

Dai Manuel: 6:10

Now, dexa scans dual energy X-ray absorption. I just always call it a DEXA scan. I never try to call it other than its acronym. If you know how to pronounce it, send me a message. On the other hand, these DEXA scans they're more commonly used in fitness and health settings. Dexa scans they're more commonly used in fitness and health settings.

Dai Manuel: 6:26

Dexa uses low-dose x-rays to differentiate between bone, fat and muscle mass. Now, it's less detailed than an MRI but is way quicker and usually always more accessible, like here in Vancouver. It's really cool. We've got a couple of private facilities where you can literally book in online, go in for a full DEXA scan and it only costs you a couple hundred bucks. It's really quite slick. I try to go at least once a year at least, but when I'm really on the ball I go twice a year, usually every six months. Now, depending on the location and facility, dexa scans are usually more affordable and, as I said, they can be as low as $50. I've never paid that little. I've paid as little as about $150. And I've seen people pay up towards $250. It really depends on the amount of detail and what they provide you after the fact. Now, additionally, dexa machines are more widely available, so it is easier to schedule and get access, and that's what I really love and I appreciate.

Dai Manuel: 7:19

Now, in terms of accuracy, dexa is highly reliable for measuring body composition. Studies have shown that DEXA can estimate body fat within a range of about 1% to 2% margin of error, so it's often a preferred choice for a lot of health professionals. Even doctors will often refer clients, especially if they're really trying to pinpoint some body composition or get an idea of what's going on internally. Dexa scans are great for that. Now, according to the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, dexa is one of the most accurate methods for measuring overall body comp, particularly though bone density, and this can be invaluable for assessing osteoporosis risk. To recommend to women, especially as they reach 45 plus, getting your bone density checked at least annually, I think, is a very good precautionary measure.

Dai Manuel: 8:07

Obviously, dexa scans can really give you some great insights, because you can get a pinpoint right down to what bone part of your body. Or just imagine maybe you had a leg injury and you hurt that leg and now you've had some atrophy of the muscle. Well, maybe the bone was damaged as well. Maybe you had a fracture that you weren't even aware of. So it's kind of neat. You can start to discover these things based on the level of detail these tests provide. It's more than just the number on a scale. Now, mri gives you pinpoint precision margin of error often less than 1% for the most part, especially around localized fat and muscle measurements, the H2O. That's where you're going to get probably the 1% to 2% margin of error. That's not always as easy, but as far as the body mass, when it comes to fat and muscle mass, oh man, it's almost spot on. So what I would suggest is do a little bit of due diligence. Obviously, you can look into both of those methods, these tests. There's some more affordable ones that are accessible and easy stuff that you can bring home with you.

Dai Manuel: 9:05

Now, technology wasn't always that way. I'll be honest. I've been selling fitness quite literally hundreds of them a month. We would sell between our eight locations and online, and it's a fancy term, but it basically means it's a body composition test in a weight scale format. So, like you're used to getting in your home with those scales, these are a little bit different. They have these little metal pads on that you stand on and what happens is a current sent from one foot up your body does this little travel. It arcs up through the body through the midsection, through where all that adipose tissue, lean masses and obviously the leaner you are, typically the more water mass you have, and the more water mass you have, the quicker the current can travel. The more body fat you're carrying, though, impedes the current, means it slows it down. So it's got all the algorithms in there and it has to measure a little bit differently.

Dai Manuel: 9:59

For athletes, to just say, people that aren't competing or training at a high level, there is some subtle differences and they've made some accounting for that in the technology, and it's just a matter of how you set the scale up before you use it. But you know you can also find them in handheld devices now. So this small current, just just so you know, because it's probably something you're like oh my God, am I going to get electric? No, you don't feel the current right. You don't feel it at all and they're generally quite affordable. I've seen prices ranging from as low as 20 bucks on Amazon to, as much as you know, we were selling some home units that were quite high quality up towards the four years and we were selling those tinnitus scales for about 250 bucks at the top end. So for a home scale, I mean these are great and I do recommend it because they are so accessible and some gyms will have them. I know the gym I train at and coach at the crossfit gym here in vancouver. They've got a tinnitus body fat scale there. I actually think I sold it to them like 15 years ago. It still works, you know.

Dai Manuel: 10:55

So, even though the accuracy does vary significantly, the errors will range between three and 5% on the normal, especially if you're dehydrated or you just finished a workout. That is not the best time of day to use these types of scales or to do any bioelectrical impedance testing, because when you're dehydrated it will confuse muscle mass and fat tissue, because that current is going to get slowed down because your muscles are probably dehydrated, your body's dehydrated, so that current is going to be impeded anyways, just based on that. So to be very accurate with this. I recommend, you know, do it at the same time every day, preferably in the morning, after you've had a couple of glasses of water first thing, or end a day if you've been really respecting your hydration. But whatever time you decide to do it, make sure you do it the same time Anytime you retest. It's just going to be a good, more accurate comparison. I know what I used to recommend to some of my clients that would buy these Tanita scales is, you know, just for a week straight, weigh yourself, do your body fat percentage testing or your body comp testing every day same time, like, say, 7am every day for a week, and then average out those numbers. That's going to probably give you pretty close to your accurate thing and then, from that point moving forward, you have a starting point and once you have a starting point, you can start to gauge progress or the opposite. You start seeing oh, that was a really nice holiday down in Mexico. Oh, too good of a holiday, I guess. And at least you can start to pick up on those things and make better decisions.

Dai Manuel: 12:22

Now another really cool unit that we'll find in typically light commercial applications. I know a couple of good friends of mine, ash, at a move down in Florida, they've just honestly just invested in one of these for their calisthenics gym, which is really cool. He's been on one of our past episodes here on the 2% Solution. He's a functional medicine practitioner and acupuncturist and someone I've been working with for a long time with my autoimmune condition and he's got an in-body scan machine. I always get to play with it.

Dai Manuel: 12:50

I think it's really cool, but the way it works and why it's so popular the fitness and health settings are really slick. You know it uses bioelectrical impedance analysis, so same as those scales I just mentioned, but it provides more detailed segmental analysis. So this is like muscle distribution and fat mass in specific body parts. So it starts to give you a little bit of a comparison so you can say left to right arm, how does it compare? How's the forearms compare? Biceps, shoulders, you know. Chest pectorals, gl, you know. So it's really quite cool, you know, if you want to be that specific and get some better insights onto what's going on, obviously I did this with my DEXA scan, but it was really neat because DEXA scan uploads to a cloud.

Dai Manuel: 13:29

You know all your results and all these DEXA machines are basically linked through a common manufacturer which collects all this data, obviously not our personal information, but the general information it does collect if we give it permission. And I gave it permission because I was like, yeah, I want to see. How am I comparing against other 47 year old dudes around the world that have done DEXA scans? And a funny thing was it came back I was top 1%. So it made me feel pretty good that my health choices are making a difference in a good way.

Dai Manuel: 14:05

But here's the funny thing we were like looking at my composition and I had this disparity by a half pound of muscle difference and it was between my left and my right butt cheek, quite, literally my left and right butt cheek. There's a half pound mass difference. And I had a really crazy groin injury years ago and I remember for the longest time I was compensating the way I would walk, the way I would do squats, the way I would do pretty much anything. And you know it's been years since then. It hasn't really aggravated me. I've been training the normal way that I am, but I just remember it was a good year. I know I was modifying a lot of movements, which means that I wasn't using all of the musculature. The normal way, I would probably not firing certain parts of my glute, particularly my glute meat on my left side. Hence you get a bit of a difference in muscle mass. So these are the cool things you can start to learn when you find out what parts of our bodies might be carrying an imbalance. It could be leading to lack of training, lack of attention or, most common you know, some sort of an injury that we've just ignored and never worked through to fix or correct and as such it creates an imbalance.

Dai Manuel: 15:06

And in-body scans typically run about $25 to $50 a test. So again, they're very affordable. Similar in margins of errors, about three to 5%, very non-invasive though. So they're really easy. You'll find them in gyms, health clinics, wellness centers all over the place, like they're. They're really quite good. So definitely one to check out at your local gyms if they have one, and just put yourself in A bod pod. This is kind of cool it's.

Dai Manuel: 15:30

It looks like a big egg. And so when you go to your bod pod test and you get into your skimpies and you step into this little pot, quite literally a big looking egg. And this method that he uses is called error displacement method and it measures body volume and then calculates body density to determine your body composition. The error of margin is only about 1% to 2%, which is similar to what we saw with the DEXA scan, and quick, often taking only a few minutes, like quite literally. When I went in, I was in and out of the place in 20 minutes and I had this full report on my body comp.

Dai Manuel: 16:03

Now, one thing about bod pods are they're not as widely as available as other methods. So because they are costly to buy one of those machines and obviously if the centers or whoever's investing in those didn't doesn't go that method, they might go with like an in-body scan or something that's a little bit more well known. Obviously it just doesn't make it accessible. I, I know if I I think there's two places in the lower mainland like this is all vancouver. We got a population about two million people. I think there's like three bod pods available for like the two million people that live around here. So you can see it's not a lot of options when it comes to the bod pod, but it's still pretty cool and they cost per session is about 45 to a hundred bucks. You will usually find bod pods, and more so, like research facilities, universities and very specialized fitness centers.

Dai Manuel: 16:47

And then, lastly, I'd be neglectful if I didn't at least mention the skin fold measurements. Chances are, you probably had those kinds of tests done before, maybe in high school during an old phys ed class, where they brought out the calipers and the phys ed teacher started to teach you how to measure each other's body fat. Anyways, hard one to do, okay, because you got to know what you do. This old school method uses calipers and this measures the thickness of skin folds at various sites on your body. It's not high tech, it's really low tech. It can be reasonably accurate, but usually only when done by a trained professional. The margin of error when done by a trained professional skinfold calipers are super inexpensive. Typically they cost about five to 50 bucks.

Dai Manuel: 17:30

I had a digital version of it when I was personal training a lot and then I would use it with my clients, like this is before. I got a Tanita scale because it was easier to just bring my scale and get in a stand on something than it was to try to do these caliper tests, cause it also takes a lot longer to do the caliper test. But I remember I had this digital one and it would actually light up a light to show me what area I was supposed to pinch and for how long, and it would keep track of all those measurements digitally and then give me a reader. At the end it was actually pretty accurate. I wasn't impressed by it, but that was getting upwards of the $50 range for a caliper. When you start looking at the digital ones, the accuracy at the end of the day it depends on human okay, human inputs and human action. It's really the person taking the measurements.

Dai Manuel: 18:11

Professional assessments are usually accessible in fitness centers or through personal trainers. If someone's trying to do your skinfold testing, it's just a matter of making sure they're experienced with it. Done it a lot, otherwise it might give you a number that one could be completely off and a wrong number is useless to you as far as goal setting and really making better decisions. But also too, I mean, they might give you a number that you really like, but it could be completely wrong too, which would then also dictate that what you did after getting that number might be very different if erroneous. So all of these tests have pros and cons. The best one for you depends on your specific needs and what you have access to. All right, so I've talked about all the tech, the equipment. I think you got a good idea, but we really need to talk about the why before I close out this episode today. Because you got to know why knowing your stats matters at all. So why should you care about any of these numbers?

Dai Manuel: 19:05

Anyways, knowing your body composition is crucial for setting realistic health and fitness goals. For instance, a regular scale won't tell you if you're losing fat or muscle, but a DEXA scan will. Understanding your body composition can help you tailor your diet, your exercise, your recovery strategies way more effectively. For example, let's say you find out you have low bone density. Well, you might as well prioritize weight-bearing exercise as well as a calcium-rich diet to start strengthening your bones. According to the National Institutes of Health, maintaining a healthy body composition is linked to lower risk of chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease and some forms of cancer. It's not just about looking good, it's about feeling good and living longer, healthier lives.

Dai Manuel: 19:54

All right, 2% Collective Warriors. That's the lowdown on MRI versus DEXA scans, as well as some of those other body composition tests. Remember, knowledge is power. By understanding your body better, you can make informed decisions to help you live your best life. If you want to dive deeper in some of the things that I talked about today, check out the links in the show notes. I linked to the Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging, american Journal of Clinical Nutrition, as well as some resources from the National Institutes of Health. All are great starting points for anyone serious about their health. Well, that's it. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the 2% Solution. If you found some of this info valuable, share it with someone who wants to improve their own health, and don't forget to follow us on social and leave us a review if you love the podcast. Stay informed, stay strong and keep pushing your limits. I'm Diamond Well and you've been listening to the 2% Solution. Let's keep thriving together and I'll see you next time.