How do you measure your waist? For me, depending on how I stand the measurement changes greatly. If I stand tall, I can make my waist slim or fat by slouching.
Body fat % varies quite a bit by sport, and in some cases position within sport. However, if you are talking about the “leanest” elite athletes in the world, then you’ll get numbers quite a bit lower that 7%. For example, the study at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/036354658301100604 found the 1 SD range for elite male sprinters started at ~5%. And I expect there are some sports that average below sprinters.
There is also a big genetic and age component, as well as dependence on medical conditions. For example, there was a period soon after college when I maintained lower than 7% (imprecise testing), with just informal working out at home, doing a combination of cardio/HIIT and weights. During this period, I was overweight based on BMI. When I tried to gain notable muscle, I had a period with a low body fat (well above 7%), but obese by BMI. There were some health issues that appeared to follow the increased weight, rather than the body fat. Both have some relevance.
It looks like this is the way to measure. According to several sites, stand up straight and slowly exhale, but do not suck in your stomach.
@rockymtnhigh That helps. I’ll try that.
No fat shaming or judgment here, but I imagine that it’s rare to have a very high BIN attributable to muscle alone. That is likely the province of bodybuilders or elite athletes like the Williams sisters, a tiny segment of the population, but the rest of those with high BMIs probably are genuinely “overfat.”
The problem isn’t how to label it, but how to fix it, and even that issue pales in comparison to that of hunger. Many more people die of hunger-related illnesses worldwide.
IMO, it is an important disticntion. High BMI and overfat can be quite different. I am slim, maybe underweight definitely not overweight. Low BMI and prediabetic. My doctor didn’t know what to suggest to me. The usual recommendations for type 2 diabetic didn’t apply to me. I can’t lose weight, I am already eating well and I exercise. But my waist is thicker than it should be. I read up and I decided that I could belong to low BMI and overfat. I changed my diet a few months ago. Both my waist and blood sugar level went down. For someone like me being on a normal healthy diet doesn’t work.
MassMom is correct. There are outliers in any data set. People always bring up elite athletes to prove that whatever indicator or measurement is bunk because those athletes defy the pattern. Duh. They are outliers. How many Williams sisters are out there? 
You don’t have to be an elite athlete for BMI to be bunk. Lots of people hit the gym for strength training and muscle development. BMI is meaningless for those folks too.
I wouldn’t consider them “outliers,” but rather just normal people doing their best to stay fit. I am in that cohort, and I’m borderline “overweight” according to BMI. Nope.
We are taking about waist/height ratio, and I see the same arguments… “me” is a group of 1.
People with low body fat but poor BMI when they are young and active, as a group, overwhelmingly become obese as they age. It’s also tough to get an accurate fat% on this group. The buoyancy tests skew low for people with dense bones. A co-worker who is probably 100 lbs. overweight claims he had 3% body fat when he was young at 5’8" and 195 lbs. There is no way that was accurate given he drinks sugary soft drinks and eats french fries. I know a wrestler who measured -5% body fat in the tank.
With >90% of men “overfat” according to the article, any measure is only going to have a small segment of the population incorrectly labeled as “overfat”. However, being incorrectly labeled as obese is likely a different story.
The BMI estimate assumes a near average lean body mass for height/weight. One does not need to be an elite athlete like the William sisters for this assumption to be inaccurate. Gaining muscle is more tied to regularly going to the gym and working out with weights than being an elite athlete since different sports have varying degrees of weight training and ideal body types. If you visit any forum focused on weight training, a large portion of posters will say their BMI is ridiculously inaccurate, including incorrect overweight and obese labels. Lean body also depends on things like frame, bone density, hydration/diet, etc. BMI is a quick and easy measure that requires no special equipment, but it should not be used blindly without taking in the context of muscle mass, frame size, age, and medical conditions. Body fat % is probably more useful than BMI, but is far less convenient of a measure.
Well, let me talk about myself. :))
BMI and height-weight measurements are OK indexes and represent a first quick look at your health, but it is NOT a the final arbiter of your true health. Clearly everyone who interested in changing their health outlook should look deeper and have their body fat tested. The results are not only eye opening, but the various tests will yield other important info like metabolic rates and bone density.
Having a low or lower body fat % really decreases your risk of having health issues in the future.
As for “going to the gym to build muscle”, MOST people are either: 1) not working hard enough (leave your books and cell phones in your gym bag and what’s with the 10 minutes of rest between exercises?), 2) doing the wrong exercises (that machine does ABSOLUTELY nothing for you, ZIP!), 3) doing the exercises incorrectly (your knees and back aren’t suppose to be contorted like that when squatting) and/or 4) spend entirely WAY too much time on the treadmill/elliptical/bicycle. This much is CRYSTAL clear to me.
I agree with the general principle that the vast majority of persons have poorly chosen workout routines, but untrained persons can gain some degree of muscle with practically any non-ridiculous weight training – resting 10+ minutes between sets is likely to work, squatting with awful form is likely to work, doing treadmill/elliptical/bicycle sequentially with weight training is likely to work, etc. Continuing to gain muscle in trained persons is more challenging.
In this trained persons group, I’d expect the two biggest issues are poorly chosen exercises and calorie balance. For example, I used to date a woman who was convinced she needed to do sets of 100+ reps to gain muscle. I tried to explain with references/studies…, but she was not convinced My father starting working out a few years ago and maintains the common guy thinking that you need to focus on your arms to gain muscle, ignoring the largest muscle groups, in the legs and back. Untrained persons can generally gain muscle with a positive, neutral, or often even negative calorie balance; but results in trained persons are more dependent on calorie balance.
The principle of “A little of something is better than nothing.” Meh, I’m sure there are instances of this type of “success” in building muscle or “getting into shape.” But some portion of this group will injure themselves (backs, knees, feet, etc.), by doing the same exercise routine w/o variation or by using improper form. Another portion that group either workout sporadically (atrophy) or just quit exercising completely.
Gym are very much like the swallows that return to Capistrano each year. Every year folks return to the gym and the gym gets crowded in January, maybe February, I suppose New Years resolutions get them there, and then by March the gym is nearly empty again.
And more importantly, as we age, we lose muscle. So gaining muscle for us older peeps is actually just trying to maintain muscle. :))