 Hey, everybody. Dr. O here. In this video, I'm going to talk about the U.S. Navy Body Fat Calculator, which to me is the simplest way to estimate or determine your body fat percentage from home. All you need is a tape measure and maybe a friend to help you with a couple parts of this. So the accuracy rate in some studies, the U.S. Navy Body Fat Calculator is accurate within three to four percent, which is really amazing. I mean, DEXA scans, the underwater weighing, you're looking at five or six percent. So even if it's not, even if it's in the same ballpark as the DEXA scan, it's cheap, convenient. You can do it on a regular basis. I really like this. So all you need to do is take proper measurements. Then you have to have a calculator to actually input the numbers. And I'll show you where I like to do that. So the measurement guidelines, that's what I want to go through here first. You can properly measure yourself. So you need to know your height. This should be barefoot. And then I recommend taking your height three times and then averaging that, right? Just to make sure it's right. Have somebody help you with this one if you can, you know, with the kids, we do it on the wall and those kind of things, but find a really good way to measure your height. Get it done at the doctor's office. That's fine. But make sure you're barefoot. Okay. So now the measurements. For a male, you need to take a measurements at the neck and at the waist. And for females, it's neck, waist, and hips. So for the neck, it's the same for both males and females. You can see an actual picture here of a naval instructor doing this. The measurement needs to go around the neck right below the larynx, right below the Adam's apple. So that's where you want to take that measurement. And I always recommend taking two or three measurements and then averaging them. So that's going to be, you want to make sure you don't get a bunch of neck muscles there. So you want to be right at that spot. You want to be too low, but then not at the Adam's apple and definitely not above it. And you shouldn't be crushing someone's windpipe there. So that's the neck, right below the larynx or the Adam's apple. The waist is going to be different for males and females. So it's at the level of the belly button for males, for most males. You put it right there at the level of the belly button, and it's the narrowest part of the abdomen for females because we're going to be comparing the waist and the hip. So that's usually going to be midway between the bottom of the sternum and between the belly button. So it's going to be a little higher like you see here in this picture. So for a male, you take the waist measurement at the navel, at the belly button. For a female, you find the narrowest part of the abdomen. The key for both though is you take it after a normal relaxed exhalation. Don't be sucking your gut in, but don't be forcing it out either. So take a few quiet, normal, quiet breaths at the end of a normal exhale is when you want to take your measurement and take a couple of them and average them out. All right. For males only, you use the hip. So this is specifically how it says in the U.S. Navy's information about this. I'll read it. The hip tape measurement consists of the circumference of the waist at the level of the greatest protrusion of the gluteal muscles. So for most people, that's going to be at the widest point of the hip, the greatest protrusion of the buttocks of the gluteal muscles. So you find that widest area there, and then you take those calculations. All right. So now if you're a male, you have your neck measurement and you have your waist measurement. If you're a female, you have your neck, your waist and your hip. Now you're ready to actually run the number. So I'm going to show you how to use the calculator that I use from Legion. So I'll take you there now. Okay. Dr. O here. So I'm going to walk you through how I take my calculations for the U.S. Navy Body Fat Calculator and where I input them, which is here on this Legion site. So I have no affiliation with them. I do buy some of their pre-workouts and different products. I like them, but that's where I found the tools. So this is not an advertisement in any way. Just a great tool. So you see I'm at Legionathletics.com slash tools there, slash tools. Yeah. You can see it there. So you see they have a lot of different tools. But the one we're going to go to is the body fat percentage calculator. So I'm going to click on it here. And then here you're going to see where you can read through all this if you want. But you're going to see that I can, let's say it's so I'm a male. I put 40 year old male, the waist 250 pounds. But notice, here's what you have to do. The originally it's the skin fold. So you click on this and you go the Navy Tape Measure Method and that's going to change things. And then you have your, your height. So you choose the height here. I'm just whatever. So six, four, you choose a, your neck measurement. Remember that's going to be right below the larynx. Let's say that it's a, when you see all the numbers are changing. So we'll say it's 22. That's a very, very big neck. And the abdomen is, we'll go to 38. So it is estimated, yeah, this is 8.59% body fat. You see here the lean mass versus fat mass. But notice, as you change these measurements, it's going to tell you your body fat percentage. So the key there is to make sure you click on the Navy body fat measurement. But now, watch this. As I click to a female, you see an extra category has now been added. So if we have a 250 pound, 40 year old female that says 55 and then you input your different numbers. So I'll just leave them here. So a 14 inch neck, 28 inch waist, 36 inch hips would put you at a 21.8% body fat measurement. So that's the key. You go to the tools section, you find their body percentage calculator. Make sure you switch right here to the Navy Tape Measure Method. And then you input all the information that you have, and it's going to give your body fat percentage. What else is it going to tell you? It tells you kind of where you would fit from a BMI standpoint. There's a lot of extra information down here if you want to go through that. But I just wanted you to have a home where you could calculate the measurements that you took, OK? I hope that this helps. All right, so hopefully that showed you how to use this calculator. I showed you with both males and females. But while you're there, while you're on their website, and again, this is not an average husband for them. I buy products from them, but I have no affiliation. This is how I found the calculators they have in their tools section. But while you're there, they also have pictures here. You see male body fat percentage pictures. And you can kind of see which one you fit closest to. And then here, we have the same thing with females. So you can use this. It can get you in the right ballpark. It's certainly not going to be perfect. But the numbers you get from the US Navy Body Fat Calculator should be somewhat similar to the pictures that you see here. All right, so why should we care? Why does this matter? Why does it matter knowing your body fat percentage? Why does it matter to know your body composition? Why do I do things like get my DEXA scans done and these types of things? General health information, absolutely. But goal setting, right? You're watching this because you probably want to lose some weight. So for goal setting purposes. But the main reason I like it is because once you know your body fat percentage, you can get better information about your basal metabolic rate and your total daily energy expenditure. People are always going online and using these calculators. If you don't know what your body fat percentage is, it has to give you a wild estimate of what it thinks your energy expenditure and your basal metabolic rate are. If you know your body fat percentage or get even close, it can really, really help you. Because two people could be six feet tall and weigh 250 pounds. One could be solid muscle. And one could have 50% body fat. So if you don't know those numbers, how does it give you the right information? So then to me, it's especially important that you know this because if you know how many pounds of fat you have on your body, you can determine how much energy your body can provide on a diet. So it can help you determine what your calorie target should be if you're on a diet. And it should also be able to help you monitor to make sure you're not being too aggressive on your diet and you're not losing too much lean mass on a diet. Because you want to make sure that you're losing fat, not just losing weight. And you want to make sure that you're losing as much fat as possible while losing as little lean tissue as possible. Like I always say, you're better off losing nothing than losing muscle. So that's why I think this stuff is important. So I hope that this helped you. Have a wonderful day. Be blessed.