Measuring Body Fat Levels

[Chris W]

Mark, you recently mentioned 5% body fat levels. 

1) How do you measure body fat levels?

It's been a while (in college working as a trainer) since I've tried to measure my body fat levels. I found the calipers to be inconsistent and the hand held impedance devices to have poor accuracy at low levels.

2) Anyone found any correlation between their levels and recovery from training and strength/power?

I'm trying to find that fine line between being as light as possible and impairing my ability to recover from hard training sessions. Having an extra data point could help. Thus far, I've been shooting for a number on the scale. 

[climber511]

I've had very repeatable results with calipers (using a 6 site system)over a 20+ year period. Is the number I get perfectly accurate - probably not but I'm more interested in if I'm trending up or down. If I'm say close to 10% over a period of 20+ years I guess it's close enough for me. I keep reading the only truly accurate way to measure is to "render" your body fat (after death) so not a very valuable approach I guess. 5% is darn hard to achieve - and even harder to maintain - so Mark is doing quite a few things right to do it. The bodybuilder sites have good information on getting lean but you have to discount all the drug usage - still the diet and exercise parts can be valuable. My own experience with taking my BF much below 8 to 10% is I tend to get sick more easily.