In contemporary fitness when you join a big box gym, they'll give you a complementary body composition test, either by a skinfold caliper test or an electronic impedance test. They'll tell you an absurd % and ask you if you've ever worked with a trainer before. To those who were in big box gyms before CF, does any of this sound familiar?
Like CrossFit, the American College of Sports Medicine has it's own "components of fitness":
- Cardiorespiratory Fitness
- Muscular Strength and Muscular Endurance
- Flexibility
- Body Composition
This is where the medical-fitness culture becomes too caught up in SYMPTOMS and do not recognize and fix the PROBLEM. If someone's body fat % is too high, we obviously have to fix that. Don't put them on medication. (This might be blunt, but) Get their fracking asses moving! Form follows function. Make them slightly more active and it should make a difference. Small or large a difference is a difference, and in when it comes to health we should all do our best to tip the scales in our favor. Speaking of scales, screw 'em.
Again, do those numbers really matter?
Or does your ability to move up some stairs matter more? Does picking up objects (heavy, not that heavy) and moving them with relative ease matter more? When your energy levels improve and you have more mental clarity, does that matter more? When your favorite pair of jeans become ill-fitting and you look better naked, doesn't that matter more?
A picture speaks a thousand words. Let yours do the same. BEFORE photos all week.
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WOD
Hang Power Clean 1-1-1
Front Squat 3-3-3
for time:
100 double unders
75 kettlebell swings, 24kg/16kg
50 box jumps, 24"/17.5"
25 burpees
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Does BF% matter for someone who wants to improve fitness?
1 comment:
Hi Guys, Peter from Vancouver Canada here. I measure body composition using a DXA scanner as my career. In my opinion, body composition sure does matter, but it is only one aspect of total fitness. It's impossible to be a great endurance runner with 40% body fat, but having 10% body fat doesn't ensure that you are fast. It just means that you are not carrying excess body fat.
It's never healthy to just focus on the numbers, but for crossfitters, percent fat can be a useful measure. Many CF guys (and girls) weigh heavy due to lots of lean tissue mass, and percent fat will show this, whereas BMI just looks at the relationship between height and weight and does not take into account if someones weight is heavy because of fat or muscle.
Cheers,
Peter
bodycomp.ca
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