Whether you are body builder preparing for a competitive event, or you are a triathlete trying to improve your performance, tracking your body fat percentage is an important part of your training.
The reason is simple. Your training and diet are designed to achieve certain results. But when you gain or lose weight, you can never say for sure whether it was fat or muscle that you lost. But you also need a way that measures your body fat in a reliable and consistent way. And that is where we are about to help you.
Where Can I Buy A Fat Caliper?
Fat calipers are available in many sporting shops as well as shops that specialize in sporting supplements. You will find they come in all shapes, sizes and colors and you can even buy digital devices.
The important thing to remember is that you should only invest in a caliper that will give you consistently accurate results. The problem is that there are products available that are very robust and will not break easy. But they sometimes come at the price of not being very accurate.
Other models will be extremely accurate, but will not stand up to life in a gym bag. Fortunately, there is one device that will satisfy both of these needs. And we have a full review of the product based on male and female needs.
Why Is Reliability Important?
When you work hard to achieve your goals you want to measure your success. It is every motivating to end a week of hard training and new diet, to see that your body fat percentage has actually gone down. When you take those small steps closer to your goal you know for sure that your hard work is paying off.
Now imagine that you are taking your weekly measurements and the results are significantly off. You try again and notice that there is a problem with the measure or spring system. That alone is quite annoying.
But how long has this caliper not been working right? Has it just broken now? Maybe you have to question the results from the past several weeks as well?
That is a situation that you want to avoid at all costs. You will find demoralizing at the very least. But it also puts your whole training and diet plan into question. What you have been doing the past weeks or months may actually not be achieving the results you were working towards.
How Does Accuracy Play A Role?
When you are making training decisions based on your body fat percentage you have to be certain about accuracy. We have seen many cheap products that seem to work just fine. But when you compare the measurements to a more professional grade caliper you will notice differences.
One way to judge accuracy is to look at the measuring scale. This should be clearly broken down to the millimeter. The problem is that at such small measurements the scale becomes difficult to read. The best models we have seen have larger scales where you can almost measure differences to the 10th of a millimeter.
The second feature to look out for is the actual trigger mechanism. On manual devices, this is spring loaded and you need to be sure that the spring is not flimsy. The light the spring the easier it will wear out or break.
You might think that digital devices would solve that problem, but you have to be aware that battery power does have an effect as well. As the battery gradually drains this can impact accuracy, even before it completely dies.
Our recommendation is to stick with a high end professional level manual caliper. Just like the ones recommended on this website.
Digital vs. Analog
Even in the fat caliper world digital technology has brought you some good options. The cool thing is that you can take multiple measurements and get your calculated result without having to right down measurements. There is a convenience factor to this that cannot be ignored.
The problem is their reliability and the fact that even minor water splashes will leave you out of pocket by quite a lot. Over time there just isn’t anything more reliable than an old fashioned analog device. Yes, you will have to right things down and add them to a calculator.
But this just takes a few minutes and you are done. We have a designated page to this topic if you want to read about it here.
How Much Should You Spend?
The simplest way we can answer this is to say you should not spend less than $10 or more than $80. Professional fitness coaches still heavily rely on manual calipers as they know they give you the most consistent results. But they also know you will be wasting your money in the long run by getting the cheapest models available.
Digital devices will cost easily over $100 but they mainly just a gimmick. It might make you look like a pro, but when the measurements are inaccurate your results will not be like those of a pro.
The Slim Guide Caliper that we recommend on this website fits perfectly into the category that gives you reliable results, but at the same time will not cost you more than your runners. For less than $50 you will receive a device that professionals love for its accuracy. At the same time, it will stand up all the knocks it will receive in your gym bag.
Where Do You Go From Here?
The simplest thing you can do is head over to our home page and see the detailed review of the Slim Guide Fat Caliper. It is by far the most robust and reliable model out there and you can one today for less than $30.
Within a few days, you’ll receive it in the post and you’ll be ready to really give your training program a boost. There simply is no substitute for reliable and accurate results when you really want to achieve high performance goals.
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