BODY COMPOSITION
At Limerick Sports & Fitness Clinic the majority of our clients come to us looking for help in losing weight. However one of the biggest points we emphasise to our clients is that their body composition is much more important than the number on the scales.
WHAT IS BODY COMPOSITION?
Your body is made up of fat free mass and fat mass. Basically your fat free mass is everything inside you that is not made from fat e.g., muscle, water, bone, ligaments, tendons and all other organs. When people come to us for weight loss, what they are actually looking for is fat loss. You can’t change the parts of your body that is made up of bones, tendons, ligaments etc but proper training and nutrition can have a massive impact on how much muscle and fat you have and this can drastically change your body composition. It is hugely important to gain muscle mass for aesthetic reasons but even more significantly from a health point of view. Muscle burns more calories at rest than fat, thus the more muscle you have the greater your metabolism will be. Muscle is also more dense than fat, lb for lb muscle takes up a lot less space in the body than fat meaning that your clothes will fit you better, you will have a lot more energy for everyday tasks and exercise, and you will look and feel better. We are trained to the International Standards for Anthropometric Assessments (ISAK Level 1) in delivering body composition measurements. Anthropometry is the science of measurement applied to the human body and includes measurements of height, weight, body girths and skinfolds. Our body composition analysis consists of :
With a trained and competent tester, the skinfold measurement technique provides one of the most valid and reliable measures for assessing body fatness.