At StrengthSpace, we measure progress to ensure that your strength training, nutrition, and overall lifestyle are supporting your health and fitness goals. Part of our strategy for this involves monthly scans with the InBody 570, a bio-electrical impedance device that is well-validated against MRI and DEXA scans.
The InBody 570 gives us an amazing look under the hood at our body composition, and goes way beyond simply telling us our body fat percentage. Here’s what the InBody can show us:
- Lean Body Mass – this dictates how much dietary protein we should eat per day to prevent age-related muscle loss, or sarcopenia. Our goal should be 1 gram of complete, bioavailable protein per pound of lean body mass, and this number goes up if we are looking to gain significant muscle, or lose a large amount of weight.
- Skeletal Muscle Mass – this is how we measure the effectiveness of our strength training program if we are looking to add lean mass. Further, losing body fat often comes with a loss of muscle, so if our primary goal is losing significant body fat, we want to minimize muscle loss to maintain our strength, and preserve our metabolic health & basal metabolic rate.
- Appendicular Lean Mass Index – this gives us a sense of how well-muscled we are for our height, which is an important measure of our risk for disease and mortality. Being at the high end of normal for this measurement means we have lower risk of heart disease and
- Visceral Fat – In a healthy person, body fat is stored under the skin, and is easily released for energy. But with metabolic dysfunction and pre-diabetes, our subcutaneous (under the skin) fat becomes less accessible, and we may start storing fat around our organs. This is called visceral fat, and it is associated with increased arterial stiffness and metabolic dysfunction, and is a major indicator of our risk for diabetes and heart disease. In the elderly, it’s also a strong predictor of a loss of functional mobility! And the good news is that while caloric restriction in some form is ultimately necessary to lose total body weight, exercise alone can effectively lower the amount of visceral fat we have by improving our metabolic health.
As you can see, the InBody gives us useful information about our health beyond what we can see in the mirror.
How to Use the InBody 570
How to interpret your results.
For regular members at StrengthSpace, the InBody is free to use, and we encourage you to use it every month. You should test in the same conditions each time to be consistent (on an empty stomach, before your workout, at the same time of day, etc). A single reading could be a fluke, but 10 readings shows a clear pattern. The more consistent you are with your tests, the more clear the trend will be indicating whether your lifestyle is actually supporting your goals.