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Your body's fat percentage is the exact amount of your weight that is made up of fat. The Body Mass Index (BMI)is one measure of how much fat your body stores but it doesn't measure how much visceral fat you have. It can be as simple as taking body measurements and using a fat calculation formula or it can be complicated as in the case of Bio-impedance measurement. This method measures electrical signals How To Measure Body Fat With Calipers through fat, lean body and water present inside body.

The other advantage of monitoring your progress by determining body fat percentages is that it also allows you to calculate you lean body mass (LBM). A bioelectrical impedance machine assesses impedance information to estimate the amount of lean and fat tissue within the body. Their findings show that BMI fails to differentiate between body fat and lean mass.

When you first start, I recommended that you use measuring tape to find the exact point you need, marking the spot with a felt-tip pen. Unless you take out measuring tape and a marker for precise measuring, I recommend using your hand to measure rather than eyeballing it. Body Tracker is remarkably easy to use, even if you have no prior experience calculating your body fat percentage. All you need is a tape measure, fat caliper, or body fat scale, and Body Tracker will show you exactly how to take your measurements. Just enter your measurements, and Body Tracker will do all the calculations for you - and save your results.

This is why I believe that almost everyone would benefit from measuring and tracking their body composition at least once in the early stages of their learning curve. If you track your weight and body composition numbers through at least two complete goal cycles - fat loss and maintenance (or muscle-building), you will discover things about how your body responds to nutrition and training and how to troubleshoot progress plateaus, that you cannot learn any other way.

Excess fat in the abdominal area (as in an apple-shaped" body) is linked to cardiovascular disease, diabetes and some cancers, while fat in the thighs and hips (a pear-shaped" body) is not a health problem and may even be protective. On the other hand, some researchers say that body-fat scales can be useful for tracking body fat changes over time and that they can help motivate some people to lose weight (regular scales can do this too, of course).

Here's the thing with body fat percentage: although it's fun to know and fun to see it getting lower as you get leaner, methods to track it can often be inaccurate. If you only want to drop a few percentage points, you can start with the advice at the top, and work your way down towards the bottom as you get lower and lower - the closer you get to single digits (dudes) or low double digits (ladies), the more strict you need to be with your diet and training. BIA uses the resistance of electrical flow through the body to estimate body fat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS0MLhpYJs4

I will try to get my husband to use the calipers on me, and see what the reading is. I just measured myself, and went to the Body Tracker Pro site you linked above, and it says 23.3%. I recently had my metabolism tested at a facility that does nutrition programs for weight loss and How To Measure Body Fat With Calipers for performance enhancement, and they use a machine that runs a current through the body, while you are laying down.