Marine Corps: Marines who get a bad body fat count receive a mandatory, and usually career-killing, adverse remark in their fitness report.
#Navy method body fat calculator professional
The consequences of exceeding body fat standards are severe.Īrmy: Soldiers listed as overweight can't re-enlist, are not eligible for promotion, aren't allowed to attend professional military schools and often are barred from leadership positions, and most of those things hold true to varying degrees for the other services. Height and weight are never taken into account. Now, however, all airmen get taped - but just around the waist. It dropped total body fat measurement as part of its new fitness assessment.
While DoD regulations require all the services to gauge body composition using the same method, the Air Force was allowed to go its own way. For both, the neck measurement is subtracted from the other measurements in an equation designed to determine their "circumference value." Those results are then compared against height measurements using Pentagon-generated charts to determine the body fat percentage. Men are measured at the neck and waist women: neck, waist and hips. Those who exceed weight limits get taped. The Army, Navy and Marine Corps use a basic height-weight body mass index tool as an initial assessment. This method is valid because of the emphasis on abdominal circumference, the site of human body fat deposition that is most strongly associated with health risks, and which corresponds to other military goals including appropriate appearance and healthy exercise habits." "This method has been carefully evaluated for applicability to Service members and represents the best approach, which can be applied by Service members with minimal error (plus or minus 1 percent). "All the DoD Components shall measure body fat using only the circumference-based method," read the regs. The closest was still nearly 12 percent off.īack in 2002, the Defense Department laid down the law when it came to body fat. The worst was a 66 percent difference between the scores. The tape test was wrong every time - and in nine out of 10 cases, the tape method measured troops' body fat percentages higher. The results: Not once did our taping match the dunk test results.
We then compared those results to the tape testing methods used by the four services. Following service-specific protocols, we taped 10 active-duty troops stationed in the Pacific Northwest and then had them undergo hydrostatic "dunk tank" testing - considered among the gold standards for determining actual body fat composition. So we decided to evaluate the tape test for ourselves. Their complaints mostly fell on deaf ears inside a military command structure looking for a quick, one-size-fits-all method of measuring the fat and fitness levels of millions of troops. Troops have long complained the tape test is unfair, an inaccurate gauge of fitness with an outsized impact on their careers. Most point to a test known as the "skin fold" or "pinch" method using calipers - still relatively easy to perform - for more accurate results. "The problem with the tape test is that it doesn't account for muscle, it just accounts for size." Jordan Moon, director of the Sports Science Center Research Institute in Denver. awful for people who are very muscular," says Dr. But while the tape test is cheap and easy to administer, many complain that it's not accurate - a claim backed by top experts. Or unfit - everyone knows that guy who looks chunky but can bench press a Mini Cooper, and outrun it, too.Īll of the services use a simple tape test to make the call on who's too fat. Just because you weigh more than most troops doesn't mean you're necessarily fat. In fiscal 2012, more than 1,300 airmen were discharged for failing to meet service fitness standards, a 400 percent increase since more rigorous standards were implemented.įiguring out who is too fat to fight, however, is easier said than done. Now, though, for every 100 PRT failures, there are 149 body composition failures.Īir Force: Last year, 1.9 percent of airmen flunked their body composition test. In 2004, for every 100 sailors who failed the PRT, 105 failed the body composition assessment. Navy: Failing the body composition portion of the overall physical fitness assessment is more common than failing the physical readiness test, and it's becoming even more so.
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