Body Fat Calculation for Boxers and Fitness Enthusiasts

Whether you’re boxing as a competitor or just for fitness, you want your body to be in peak performance so that you can get the most out of your training and have the stamina, endurance, and drive to do your best under any circumstances.

Part of getting into peak performance is keeping your body fat at certain levels, but before you go dieting or even adding some fat on, you need to know what your body fat is and what the best range for you will be.

What Is Optimal Body Fat Percentage?

The optimal body fat percentage depends on who you are and what you do. However, certain levels put you too low for anything and levels that put you into an unhealthy obese range.

For men, if you are below 5% body fat, then you will likely have some issues, especially around your hormones and energy levels. You may also be constantly hangry. The obsolete lowest you could go would be 2%, and lower than that is seriously dangerous.

On the other hand, if you’re above 25% body fat, you are venturing into the obese body fat range. The average Canadian male should be around 20% body fat to be healthy but not especially athletic.

Athletes can have different optimal body fat percentages. However, as we see below, they’re all below the average body fat percentages.

Women have different optimal body fat percentages, and their distribution of fat is different from men. For example, the average Canadian woman could be sitting around 25% as a non-athlete and would start to be considered obese over 30%. The lowest a woman would want to go before starting to have issues would be 10%.

So what is the optimal boxing body fat percentage for a woman? As a competitive boxer, the range would be around 14-20%; as a fitness enthusiast, you could be about 21-24%.

So to break it into simple terms:

Why Does Body Fat Percentage Matter?

There is a range where your height and weight put you in an optimal range. Often people will complain that body fat percentage doesn’t take into account muscle or health. However, when talking about boxing, it’s not about how big your muscles are or if you feel healthy; it’s all about performance, and that can to some degree be determined by body fat percentage.

If you are too slim, you won’t be fighting optimally, especially if it affects your hormone levels. The same is true for having too much fat on your body; it can slow you down and affect your hormone levels.

For example, if you’re 140 lbs but decide you want to fight in a higher weight class and gain 20 lbs. You’ll have two issues, the first being that it’s difficult to gain lean muscle mass, that 20 lbs will be primarily fat, or best case scenario water. Second, the extra weight will slow you down, increase the drag on your energy, and the added power you think you’ll get will not be there because the fat will not make you hit harder or faster.

Do I Have To Fit Into The Range?

To be clear, everybody works differently, and what is optimal for one person may not be optimal for another. You should always try to stay within the healthy body fat ranges but move around to see where you perform the best. Your body may need a little extra fat, or you may find being leaner, you have more energy, and just feel better.

So the takeaway is to test and find where your body wants to be and then stick with that. Of course, as you age, you may find this changes to some degree, so keep an eye on your performance and body as your progress through your training.

How Do I Test Body Fat Percentage?

There are several ways to test your body fat percentage, and they have varying degrees of accuracy. So depending on how important it is, you can decide which method you try or try multiple ways to get an idea of how they all compare to each other.

Body Fat Percentage Calculators

The simplest method you can use is an online body fat calculator, such as the one listed on this page. This is a very basic way to get a general idea of what your percentage is.

It simply takes your gender, age, height, and weight then performs calculations to give you a standard value. It can be relatively accurate up to wildly inaccurate. The truth is that most bodybuilders or people with a lot of muscle will calculate a high body fat percentage, but other methods will calculate them very low.

However, this is a great way to get a start to see if you’re potentially too high or too low.

Body Fat Scales

Standard scales will only tell you your weight; however, body fat scales will test your body fat. These will most often send a signal up to one leg and down the other and measure the resistance, allowing it to read your percentage.

The issues you’ll find are that it primarily tests your leg body fat, and your hydration level can also impact the results.

Calipers

Calipers are often used at gyms, give a relatively accurate measurement of your body fat, and test different areas to show if any particular location is higher than expected.

The calipers are relatively cheap, but you need a little training and help to get the measurements.

DEXA Scan

A DEXA scan is a medical device that scans your entire body and gives you an almost 100% accurate result on what your body fat is, where it’s located, and even tells you if one side of your body is fatter than the other.

The added benefit of the DEXA scan is that it will give you your muscle mass and bone density. So it’s a complete and accurate scan, though it will cost you around $150 to get it done. So it is certainly more expensive than a free online calculator.

So Now What?

Start with the basics, put your details into the online body fat calculator and see where you sit in the range. It’s a free, easy, and trackable option that, unless you’re really going for high performance, you can just keep track of what your body fat percentage may be and see it go up and down as measurements change.