So, we’re into the new year, and you’re thinking of starting a gym membership maybe even finding yourself a Trainer / Coach? That initial session should involve some sort of assessments, whether they are Cardiovascular, Strength and Power, Postural and Movement or Body Statistics. The last one being the most recognised way for collecting data. One of which is still being used to this day is the BMI test (Body Mass Index) and to be honest it’s too heavily relied upon in this day and age, if it should be used at all anymore!
In fact, I don’t even use the test with my clients, and if I do have the numbers, I won’t share it with them and here’s why.
The BMI test calculates a person’s health based on their height and weight to determine whether they’re underweight, healthy, overweight or obese. Pretty simple right? Well unfortunately the human body isn’t that simple! To me, it’s of no use anymore. We’re talking about a test that was designed back in the 1800’s and was ‘mainstreamed’ by the 1900’s, a lot has changed in the past 100+ years. At that time people were more physically active in their everyday lives, jobs, housework, travelling. Whereas now we’ve become more sedentary – sat at desks, on sofa’s watching T.V. / Netflix / playing video games! There was food rationing back in the 1940’s, we had to be conservative with food. Now we have fast food franchises, being wasteful with food (over facing ourselves, throwing food away).
A study in 2016 by UCLA found that tens of millions of people who scored overweight or obese were in fact perfectly healthy, 30% of people however with ‘healthy’ BMI were found unhealthy on other tests. A simple fact that the BMI test only looks at your overall weight and can’t distinguish between fat and muscle. The volume of a pound of fat is larger, while muscle is about 18% more dense. It also doesn’t take into account where body fat is carried, a ‘healthy’ BMI result won’t pick up visceral fat around the bodies organs which could be an unhealthy amount. Professional athletes very often would come up as ‘overweight’ on a BMI test because they would more than likely be carrying more muscle due to the demands of their sport, an example of this is England Rugby Union and Northampton Saints’ Dylan Hartley. He is 185cm tall and has a recorded weight of 108kg (sourced from englandrugby.com) which when calculated gives him a BMI score of 31.6 which would give him a classification of Obese, another example we can look at is Hollywood action star, former WWE wrestler Dwayne Johnson. He posted on his Instagram just before Christmas, recording his weight at 275lbs (124.73kg), if we calculated his BMI using that recorded weight and his height of 196cm (6ft 5in) he would score 32.5 and would be classed as obese, but we can all clearly see that these scores do not give a true reflection of these 2 people’s health as neither men look overweight.
In an age where information is so easy to access, and technology has improved so much, giving us better, more accurate ways to record an assessment. Should this method should still be used? What seems to be even more concerning is the fact that they use the BMI test to assess children! Now my memory isn’t the best, and I don’t even remember ever having a BMI test growing up till I was about 14/15 maybe? When kids’ bodies are constantly changing, developing, most kids end up having growth spurts at some point, even if it was accurate how relevant is it really going to be in a few months – a years’ time? End of the day when it comes to children, which numbers are more concerning? Results from a BMI assessment or the number of hours spent sat watching T.V. or playing video games?
End of the day to sum up, it is a very inaccurate test! The study in 2016 showed so many people being misdiagnosed and professional athletes don’t score “correctly”. The World has changed so much since it was first introduced and so have many other forms of assessments, that it has surely become redundant. As an initial starting point, an indicator to then investigate closely and in more detail the test can still be of some use but not as a final answer to an assessment.
