Grab your favourite pair of pants or shorts that already fit you well and lay them on a flat surface. Measure from the crotch seam to the bottom opening of the pant.
Bring it down under your crotch, up around the curve of your butt and back up to the waist at your back. Relax your stomach when measuring; otherwise, your pants will feel too tight. People with athletic builds often have trouble finding pants that fit their butts properly. Measure your butt for the perfect fit. Looking at your profile in the mirror, wrap the measuring tape around the fullest point of your butt, meeting at the front of your hips.
Make sure to keep the tape snug, but not tight, and ensure that the tape measure is level from front to back. All conversions are approximate. Men Men. Fit Slim Relaxed Straight Jogger. Women Women. Be sure to note your thigh measurement in a notebook or mobile device. A single stand-alone measurement is really of no use to you, but if you measure your thighs every month, seeing the change in measurements over time will give you a good read on your progress.
Methods like dual X-ray energy absorptiometry and hydrostatic weighing are the gold standard for measuring body composition, but they're expensive and usually only available in medical facilities, exercise science laboratories and some higher-end gyms. Skinfold caliper measurements are an inexpensive means of tracking body composition, and when done by a skilled trainer, they can be very accurate. But they're also notoriously inconsistent when done by someone without the proper training, or even by two different people who are properly trained in doing them.
So if you're using skinfold measurements to track your body composition, it's best to use them to track your relative progress — as opposed to hard, objective numbers — and to have the same person take the measurements each time. Lisa is a retired personal trainer with more than 4, hours of hands-on experience working with a variety of clients, from sports teams to weight loss and post-rehab populations. She's also a professional writer. Published credits in the health field include Livestrong.
Obesity may soon overtake smoking as the leading preventable cause of death in the United States. Even now, overweight and obesity account for almost , deaths a year, and if present trends continue, the number is sure to rise.
As scientists have struggled to understand why obesity increases the risk of heart attack, stroke, hypertension, diabetes, cancer, arthritis, and other woes, they have refined the definition of obesity. Because the hazard is not body weight but body fat , simple height and weight charts have given way to a mathematic formula that uses these two measurements to calculate the body mass index, or BMI.
A BMI between 25 and 30 signals overweight, and a score of 30 or above indicates obesity. Although the BMI provides a reasonably accurate reflection of body fat, it does not tell how that fat is distributed. Research shows that not all fat is created equal. In fact, fat plastered around the body's internal organs visceral fat is much more dangerous than fat layered beneath the skin subcutaneous fat ; that's why liposuction and "tummy tuck" operations may improve your profile but won't help your metabolism or your health.
Scientists depend on fancy equipment to measure visceral fat directly, but you can get the practical information you need to evaluate your risk by using a humble tape measure. Many studies confirm that upper body fat the "apple shape," or "beer belly" is much more dangerous than lower body fat the "pear shape". You can find out where you stand simply by measuring your waist circumference or by measuring your waist and hips and then dividing your waist measurement in inches by your hip measurement in inches to calculate your waist-to-hip ratio.
The table below shows what your results mean. A weighty body of evidence shows that upper body fat is more hazardous than lower body fat. Until recently, doctors assumed that even if lower body fat is less dangerous than upper body fat, it's no bargain on its own. But research may change that belief; without questioning the fact that upper body fat is a formidable foe, it raises the startling possibility that lower body fat may actually be a friend to health.
To find out how thigh circumference affects health, Danish scientists evaluated 2, men and women ages 35 to 65 who were free of heart disease, stroke, and cancer when they joined the study in the late '80s. Each participant provided a detailed health history and each underwent comprehensive examinations that included measurements of height, weight, and thigh, hip, and waist circumferences, as well as body fat percentage, which was determined by the highly accurate impedance method.
Researchers tracked the volunteers for an average of They found that people with big thighs had a lower risk of heart disease and premature death than those with thin thighs. In round numbers, a thigh circumference measured where the thigh meets the butt of about 62 cm about The predictive value of thigh size held up even after the scientists accounted for other indicators of body composition, including waist circumference, BMI, height, and body fat percentage. And thigh size remained a strong independent predictor even after researchers adjusted for risk factors such as smoking, exercise, alcohol use, systolic blood pressure, cholesterol and triglyceride levels, and for women menopause.
It's only one study, but its results are impressive. Still, because the scientists measured thigh size but not thigh composition, they can't tell if the apparent protection of big thighs is due to more muscle, more fat, or both. It's tempting to wonder if national personality traits influence the design of scientific studies; for whatever reason, the Danish study focused on thighs, while a British study zeroed in on arms. In this case, scientists investigated 4, men between the ages of 60 and 79; men who were underweight BMI below Researchers evaluated the body composition of each subject by measuring height, weight, waist and hip circumference, mid-arm muscle circumference, and overall fat mass and muscle mass.
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