Your body fat percentage can be a great goal and marker of progress because let’s be honest, most guys train to get a lean ripped body and look muscular. So the less fat you have the more defined your abs are. But what exactly does having a certain percentage of fat look like?
To measure your body fat percentage there are many ways and calculators and most of them aren’t very accurate. When you think about it, what’s the goal of measuring your body fat? It’s not to assign some specific number, it’s to have a goal and measurement of how you want your body to like like. So it makes sense to know how a specific percentage of fat looks like. That’s why comparing visually your own muscular definition with the look that is known to have a certain body fat percentage range is quick, easy, fun and useful.
I’ll use a wonderful infographic from Athlean-X’s Jeff Cavalier:
Just by looking at the pictures above you can really tell if your own body looks the same way, which will tell you in which percentage range you are. And more importantly you will see how far you still have to go and what you can expect when you get there. It really simplifies the way you look at your goals and motivates you to keep going.
A bit on the body fat percentage ranges:
- 35-40% is a morbidly obese range and you really don’t want to be there as all you can see on your body is fat.
- 25-30% is also not the rage you’d want to be in also as that’s considered obese in males and you look all soft and round.
- 20-24% is where the average guys are. You don’t look unhealthy and you can see some muscles but little to no definition.
- 16-19% is where some definition starts to show but not much, you may have love handles in this range.
- 13-15% is a pretty good range that can be defined as fit and you can already see some abs.
- 11-12% is a good range to be in where you can see a decent amount of muscle definition but those abs are only ripped in the correct lighting and make up.
- 8-10% is where most guys want to be – there’s a lot of definition, your abs are clearly visible in any lighting, and it’s the classic beach body.
- 5-7% is a difficult range to maintain and it’s where the fitness models try to be before photo shoots.
- 1-4% is the range of bodybuilders during competition. It’s not really a healthy state to be in and extremely difficult to maintain. You probably don’t want to get there unless you are a bodybuilder who competes.
So there you have it, check out the infographic and try to pin point where you are now, see how far you still have to go and what you will look like when you get there.