Scales That Measure Body Fat

In a store the other day, I saw a weight scale that said it could also measure body fat by sending an electric pulse throughout the body. Has anyone seen these types of scales before, and if so, how accurate are they at measuring body fat?

[quote]maverick_ace wrote:
In a store the other day, I saw a weight scale that said it could also measure body fat by sending an electric pulse throughout the body. Has anyone seen these types of scales before, and if so, how accurate are they at measuring body fat?[/quote]

They suck. Read this thread (among others):

http://www.t-nation.com/readTopic.do?id=543434

Hmm… I dont know, My girl bought me one and it seems to be pretty accurate. I use calipers that put me in the same range as the scale does. The tip that I have read, and use, is to measure yourself under the same conditions every time. For instance, I always measure Sunday morning, right out of bed before breakfast. The numbers seem to come out right on mine.

I think there have been articles and/or threads on this here before. The consensus seems to be that, especially for bodybuilders, they’re off in terms of giving you a number that actually represents your BF percentage, but they’re useful for meaasuring rate of change. (They were designed for not-so-athletic folks. The Tanita scale that I have does have an “athletic” setting, but that’s geared toward runners and endurance athletes, not those with a lot of muscle mass).

For example, my Tanita scale tells me I’m 19 or 20% BF, which is clearly way off, while my Accumeasure calipers tell my I’m around 7 or 8%. I’m probably, in all reality, much closer to the Accumeasure number (although maybe not quite that low), but the Tanita is useful for tracking whether I’m going up or down over the course of days and weeks, whereas the Accumeasure seems useful only for charting somewhat larger changes in BF, i.e. over several weeks or more.