InBody Assessments, Part 3: How to Ensure the Most Accurate Results
Living Well
By: Rob Coates, Personal Training Director, Toronto Athletic Club
If you missed Part 1 & 2 of this series, I’d encourage you to find them here and here. We covered my favourite Dinosaurs and which of the Flintstone’s characters I was friends with… Can you say cliffhanger!?
If you read Part 1 and 2, thank you & sorry about the humour, you’ve made your appointment to get on the InBody, and want to ensure you have the best possible test results, please read on.
General Testing Guidelines:
- Do not eat for 3-4 hours before testing.
- Do not exercise for 6-12 hours before testing.
- Ensure access to both feet with removable footwear and socks.
- Do not drink caffeine on the day of your test and be well hydrated.
- Do not shower or sauna immediately prior to test.
Practical Guidelines:
- If it’s difficult to adhere perfectly to any of the above guidelines, consider a time of day you’d be able to easily re-test under the exact same circumstances:
- This is most important from a test/re-test standpoint. We won’t provide you with the most accurate snapshot of your measurements, but it will be relevant if the same circumstances are present in subsequent tests.
- It may make you feel fat:
- Easiest explanation is we all under-estimate our body fat percentage because we’ve been taught that the lower the better. This type of human-itis shows up when I ask some members how tall they are. I usually have to ask “Is that Tinder height or doctor’s office height?”. Long story short, they are all just readings we take with the intention of improving them. If your Body Fat % is high on your first test, we can design a plan to ensure it’s lower on the next test. Improving upon the numbers is what’s important.
- Consider Re-Testing Every 3 months at the earliest:
- The best day-to-day assessment of your body composition is the scale & how your clothes fit. There is enough test-to-test and day-to-day variance physiologically where a month of improvements could be overshadowed by the normal ebbs and flows of our bodies on a given day. At 3 months, those variances are reduced and quarter over quarter, we’ll get the best indicator of progress. If you need the accountability of monthly check-ins, the Pre-testing guidelines become most important to ensure an accurate test.
Through this three part series, I hope you’ve come away with a more thorough understanding of what the InBody portion of our Assessments offer and why the metrics are important for both tracking and achieving our goals as well as assessing some important health and biomechanical markers.
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