Body fat percentage is one of the most frequently used body composition metrics.
Many different techniques can provide you with an estimate of your body fat percentage.
However, even after you’ve obtained your body fat percentage, you may still wonder how you interpret this value.
What exactly does your body fat percentage mean? What is a healthy or “good” body fat percentage?
This article will discuss how to interpret your body fat percentage.
As you will see, there are several ways to do this. To make things easier, this article includes interactive applications that I built to help you understand your specific body fat percentage.
Using these apps, you can enter your body fat percentage and other basic information (such as sex, age, and race) to be provided with an interpretation of your specific body fat percentage.
If you want to skip directly to the interactive apps, click here.
Table of Contents
Background
What is Body Fat Percentage?
Body fat percentage is the percent of your total body mass (weight) that is fat mass. Fat mass is an estimate of the total mass of all the fat molecules in your body.
For example, if your body mass is 200 pounds (90.7 kg), and you have 40 pounds (18.1 kg) of fat mass, your body fat percentage is:
So, the general equation to calculate body fat percentage is:
Many health organizations focus on body mass index (BMI; your weight in kilograms divided by your height in meters, squared) to classify the weight status of individuals.
However, BMI treats all body mass the same. That is, your BMI would increase regardless of whether you gained weight from more fat mass or more fat-free mass.
While BMI is correlated with body fat percentage in the general population, there are many individuals who may have a high BMI but healthy body fat percentage. Conversely, there are plenty of individuals with a low, “healthy” BMI but a high body fat percentage.
Because of this, looking at body composition metrics like body fat percentage can be more informative than relying on BMI alone.
How is Body Fat Percentage Measured?
Many different methods provide body fat percentage values.
Common techniques include skinfold calipers, bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA), dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA), air displacement plethysmography (the Bod Pod), ultrasound, underwater weighing, 3-dimensional scanning, and simple prediction equations.
My research team studies the accuracy of many of these devices, and the details of these methods will be covered in future articles.
For now, it is important to realize that any device, tool, or calculator providing you with your body fat percentage is only providing an estimate of your true body fat percentage. This is because all methods have error (no method is perfect).
Some high-quality techniques are available, mostly in certain medical, research, or fitness settings. For example, we have several of these techniques in my research lab, as pictured.
However, the methods that are most commonly available to the general population are often less accurate.
Regardless of how you obtain your body fat percentage, recognize that this number is not perfectly accurate and that changes in your body fat percentage over time should be viewed cautiously, especially if you are using a less accurate method.
As a side note, there are still ways you can track your body composition at home without fancy, expensive equipment. I have written a separate article on that topic.
What is a Healthy or “Good” Body Fat Percentage?
Body Composition and Health
It is essential to realize that body composition is one important health metric, but it is not the only important health metric.
Just knowing your body fat percentage cannot tell you if you are healthy or unhealthy overall. For a true overall health assessment, you would need to consider additional information beyond just body composition.
Still, there are body fat percentage ranges that are more consistently associated with good health or fitness.
People may also have their own personal goals for body composition that are not solely based on health.
Ways to Understand Body Fat Percentage
There are multiple ways to conceptualize what body fat percentage is “healthy” or “good.”
Some research examines the relationship between body fat percentage and various health or disease metrics.
For example, one study found the lowest risk of all-cause mortality (death from any cause) at a body fat percentage of 22% in men and 35% in women.
However, there are many complications with this kind of research, and the body fat percentages of 22% and 35% shouldn’t be interpreted as goals for individual men and women.
Another method that is sometimes used to understand body fat percentage is simply to compare your value to ranges established by expert opinion. This is fairly common in sports settings.
While not perfect, this is one way to get a general sense of how you would be categorized based on body fat percentage.
Perhaps the most common method of understanding body fat percentage is to compare an individual’s value to the general population, ideally those of the same sex and race, as well as similar age.
This type of comparison is often accomplished by using percentiles.
Percentile-based Comparisons
Percentiles are measures used in statistics to indicate the relative standing of a value within a data set.
For example, if a test score is in the 90th percentile, it means the score is higher than 90% of the other scores it is being compared to.
Percentiles essentially divide the data we are looking at into 100 equal parts, helping us easily compare values.
Percentiles are used in several of the interactive apps in this article. Each time you use an app producing a percentile result, I have included text to provide an interpretation of what the percentile means.
Percentiles can also be linked to subjective ratings like “good” or “poor” to provide additional, easy-to-understand context.
While comparing yourself to the general population is one simple way to get a sense of what your body fat percentage means, it is important to understand the data set being used for the comparison.
The comparison data will typically be based on one specific method of body fat estimation and may not always include a representative sample of individuals.
For each of the interactive apps in this article, I provide information about the body composition assessment methods and populations used to produce the data to help you understand what you are being compared to.
Summary
In summary, there are multiple ways to think about what constitutes a “healthy” or “good” body fat percentage.
Some of these include establishing the relationship between body fat percentage and health metrics, relying on expert opinion, and performing comparisons to the general population.
There is no consensus on which of these methods is best. Still, each represents a potential tool that can be used to interpret your body composition.
Finally, many individuals may have goals for their appearance or body fat percentage that aren’t necessarily linked to health alone.
For example, many fitness-minded individuals may be pursuing a certain level of leanness as part of their own personal goals.
Interactive Body Fat Percentage Applications
Data Sources
Since there are multiple ways to interpret your body fat percentage, I built a multi-part interactive application to give you different perspectives and several options for comparison data.
Each individual app within the overall application was built using a different set of body fat percentage values, as presented and explained in the sections below.
Be aware that each individual app is built using data from different people. While most of the datasets are large (thousands of adults), they still have limitations.
To help you understand more about the data each calculator is based on, here is a table describing the sources of data I used to develop each app:
| App | Data Source | Body Composition Method | Number of Participants Total Males Females | Ages | Race and Ethnicity | Location | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | American College of Sports Medicine Guidelines for Exercise Testing and Prescription, 10th and 11th editions (link) | Skinfold calipers | 60,578 42,071 18,507 | Range: 20 to 79 years Distribution: >300 individuals per decade per sex | Not reported | United States (Texas) | Adapted from “Physical Fitness Assessments and Norms for Adults and Law Enforcement” from the Cooper Institute in Dallas, TX |
| 2 | Sport Nutrition textbook by Jeukendrup and Gleeson (link) | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | Data presented as “Body fat percentages for males and females and their classification” with the caveat: “Please keep in mind that these are only rough estimates. The term athletic in this context refers to sports where low body fat is an advantage.” |
| 3 | Kelly et al. 2009, PLOS ONE (link) | DXA (Hologic QDR 4500A fan beam densitometer with NHANES correction) | 20,553 10,560 9,993 | Range: 20 to >85 years (for adult analysis) Distribution: >200 individuals per decade per sex | White (n=9,304) Black (n=5,393) Mexican American (n=5,856) | United States (nationally representative sample) | |
| 4 | Imboden et al. 2017, PLOS ONE (link) | DXA (GE Lunar Prodigy and iDXA; both fan beam) | 3,327 1,251 2,076 | Range: 20 to 79 years Distribution: > 100 individuals per decade per sex Average age: 45.8 ± 18.3 years (mean ± SD) | White (92 to 96%) XX(range due to sex) Black (~1.25%) Asian (<0.5%) Other (<0.5%) Unspecified (1.9 to 5.8%) | United States (Indiana and Wisconsin) | Data obtained from two laboratories, both of which focus on exercise of physical activity. |
| 5 | Gallagher et al. 2000, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (link) | Unconventional. DXA (multiple models) and 4-compartment model body fat values linked to BMI categories | 1,626 613 1,013 | Average age: ranged from 39 ± 16 to 56 ± 17 (mean ± SD) for different sex/race subgroups | Good representation in White (n=417), Black (n=254), Asian (n=955) | United States, Japan, United Kingdom |
Which App Should You Use?
You may want to choose one single app that seems most applicable to you. For example, if you have a recent body fat percentage value from skinfold calipers, it may make the most sense to use the app whose data came from this method (app #1).
You can also look at the demographic information in the table from the previous section to see if one app has better representation for you. For example, some datasets have good representation of different races, while others do not.
If you aren’t sure which app would be best to use, you can also try entering your body fat percentage value into several or all of the apps to see how your value would be interpreted differently when compared to different data sets.
Just remember that most of the apps below use data from one specific body composition technique, such as skinfolds or DXA. As such, the apps may be most applicable to data obtained by these methods (and the specific way they were implemented in the corresponding research study).
However, you can still tentatively use these values to help contextualize your body fat percentage from other techniques. That is, all of the apps can help guide you in getting a better overall understanding of your body fat percentage.
In case you still don’t know which app to use, I will mention that apps #1 and #3 are built on the most comprehensive databases of participants. So, if you don’t know where to start, I would try these first. However, be sure you read the details I provide about each app later in this article to be sure you understand their strengths and limitations!
With those caveats and disclaimers out of the way, the interactive body fat percentage applications are presented in the next section.
The Apps
Click “Load Apps” below to load the interactive body fat percentage interpretation application.
The Details
App #1: American College of Sports Medicine Guidelines
The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) is a well-respected professional organization whose mission is to “educate and empower professionals to advance the science and practice of health and human performance.”
One of their popular books is ACSM’s Guidelines for Exercise Testing and Prescription, which is currently in its 11th edition.
This book presents reference values for body fat percentage that are adapted from a very large dataset of values collected using skinfold calipers. It is important to realize that both the assessment method and specific population these values were developed in can influence the body fat percentage values it contains.
Nonetheless, these large datasets of nearly 20,000 women and over 40,000 men can be one helpful way to understand your body fat percentage.
To me, the original tables presented by ACSM are not the most user-friendly. So, I integrated the values that are publicly available on ACSM’s website into the interactive app in the previous section.
This app asks you to enter your sex, age range, and body fat percentage. When you enter this information, you will be provided with a result that indicates your approximate percentile for body fat percentage, based on the ACSM data, as well as a rating category (very lean, excellent, good, fair, poor, or very poor). You’re also provided with some additional details to help you interpret your result.
It is important to remember that the values used by ACSM are just one set of data. While there are strengths to this dataset, the skinfold assessments can tend to produce lower values than some other methods (meaning that your result from another method can look worse).
As such, it’s worth looking at other categorizations of body fat percentage (such as the other interactive applications in this article).
App #2: Sport Nutrition Guidelines
Some individuals might simply want to know how their body fat percentage compares to active or athletic individuals in general.
In this case, we can consider the interpretation of body fat percentage offered by sports nutrition experts.
For example, in their textbook Sport Nutrition, Dr. Asker Jeukendrup and Dr. Michael Gleeson – two prominent sports nutrition experts – provide body fat percentage value ranges that they believe correspond to ratings of athletic, good, acceptable, overweight, and obesity. These ranges are publicly available on the publisher’s website.
However, Jeukendrup and Gleeson also provide an appropriate disclaimer about these values: “Please keep in mind that these are only rough estimates. The term athletic in this context refers to sports where low body fat is an advantage.”
In the simple app I built using these ranges, you can select your sex and enter your body fat percentage to see where your value falls based on the categories presented by Drs. Jeukendrup and Gleeson.
As you may have noticed, this calculator is much simpler than several others in this article. Specifically, the general ranges are not based on age, race, or ethnicity.
While the simplicity of these categories is attractive, they are not, to my knowledge, based on specific reference data like the other applications are.
So, the ratings from this calculator more closely represent the expert opinion of two prominent sports nutrition researchers rather than hard data.
App #3: DXA Reference Data (Hologic Scanners)
Dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) is a widely used and well-accepted method of estimating body composition.
This imaging technique is quick, easy, and provides a large amount of useful body composition data, both for the whole body and individual body segments.
DXA is often used in clinical research and some medical settings. Additionally, it has continued to increase in popularity among the evidence-based fitness community over the past decades.
While it isn’t perfect (no method is), DXA’s many attractive features have led to its use in several large, important research studies.
One of these is called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which is an ongoing program that evaluates the health and nutritional status of adults and children in the United States.
The DXA body composition data from thousands of adults who participated in NHANES have been used to generate reference data for the general population.
This work has been published in a peer-reviewed research article and is freely available.
I used the data from over 14,000 adults in this study to build interactive app #3, along with adapting the subjective rating categories used by ACSM.
For this app, you first select your sex, age, and race. You then enter your body fat percentage. After this, you will be provided with a result that includes the percentile around which your body fat percentage falls and explains what this means. You will also be provided with a subjective rating category (i.e., very lean, excellent, good, fair, poor, or very poor).
The data used in this app were produced using Hologic brand DXA scanners. Reference data based on the other major DXA manufacturer (GE) is included in app #4.
Please note that based on the dataset used, the only race categories are White, Black, and Mexican American. If you don’t fall into any of these categories, you could still use the calculator and cycle through each race option to get a general idea of how you could interpret a body fat percentage.
Be aware that the reference values for app #3 will appear higher than with many other methods due to specific software settings used in this study. So, your percentile may appear lower (“better”) than with the other calculators.
The reason for this deals with the details of the Hologic DXA software options. Specifically, this data set was generated with the ‘NHANES correction’ turned on, meaning that reference body fat percentage values are ~5% higher than if this option is turned off.
So, if you have results from a Hologic DXA scanner with the ‘NHANES correction’ turned off, you would need to add 5% body fat to your value to get a more accurate percentile and interpretation.
This is also why, if you are entering your body fat percentage from another method (I.e., not DXA), your percentile may appear lower (“better”) than with other calculators.
App #4: DXA Reference Data (GE Scanners)
Besides Hologic, the other major manufacturer of DXA scanners is General Electric (GE).
One peer-reviewed research study presented data from over 2,000 women and over 1,200 men in the United States to help establish reference data for body fat percentage values.
App #4 uses this data set, along with adapting the subjective rating categories used by ACSM.
For this app, you select your sex and age range, then enter your body fat percentage. You will then be provided with a result that presents the percentile around which your body fat percentage falls and explains what this means. You will also be provided with a subjective rating category (i.e., very lean, excellent, good, fair, poor, or very poor).
It is important to note that over 90% of the population used for this data set was White. Because of this, race-specific percentiles were not established.
Additionally, data were collected from laboratories focused on exercise. As such, the individuals in this dataset may be less representative of the general population than some other apps, such as app #3.
App #5: 4-compartment Model vs. Body Mass Index Categories
Several of the previous apps I discussed were based on comparing your body fat percentage to large groups of other individuals.
While this method can be useful, there are alternative approaches that have been used to attempt to define what a “healthy” body fat percentage is.
One such exploratory approach used by researchers was to establish the body fat percentage values that corresponded to frequently used body mass index (BMI) categories.
To do this, one group of researchers used body composition results and BMI values from adults in the United States, Japan, and the United Kingdom.
They mathematically established the relationship between typical BMI categories (below) and the corresponding body fat percentage values they observed. Their results were reported in a peer-reviewed research article.
| Category | BMI Range (kg/m²) |
|---|---|
| Underweight | Less than 18.5 |
| Normal weight | 18.5 – 24.9 |
| Overweight | 25.0 – 29.9 |
| Obesity I | 30.0 – 34.9 |
| Obesity II | 35.0 – 39.9 |
| Obesity III | 40.0 and above |
The researchers used both DXA and another excellent method called the 4-compartment model to establish the body fat percentage values of the individuals in this study. I used the 4-compartment model body composition data in app #5.
To use this app, you select your sex, age range, and race. You then enter your body fat percentage. After this, you’re provided with a subjective rating category of very lean, good, poor, or very poor.
As mentioned, these categories were established based on the relationship between BMI and body fat percentage.
Some may feel this is not an ideal way to establish ratings for body fat percentage, but I wanted to present this as an alternative option to complement the other calculators based on group norms (apps #1, #3, and #4) and expert opinion (app #2).
Summary
Body fat percentage is a common body composition metric that tells you the percentage of your weight that is fat mass.
If you are interested in health and fitness, you may have completed a body composition test that provided you with your body fat percentage.
The interactive applications in this article can help you interpret your body fat percentage.
However, it is important to remember that body fat percentage is just a single metric, and it does not give a complete picture of your health.
Considering other factors beyond body composition alone – such as your mental wellbeing, physical performance, sleep, blood markers, blood pressure, and more – can help you form a more complete picture of your overall health.
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Disclaimers: The information provided in this article is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Always consult with your physician or a qualified healthcare provider regarding any medical concerns, including weight and body composition management. While efforts were made to ensure accuracy of the presented information, the author is not responsible for any inaccuracies, omissions, or errors.