Stepping onto a scale can let you know if your weight is healthy, but it can't tell you much about body composition. Knowing how much of your weight is fat and how much is muscle helps you determine your level of fitness. The most effective way to determine how much of your body mass is muscle is to visit your doctor, who can recommend measurement methods that will work well for your body type and needs.
Body Fat Percentage
To determine how fit you are, you must find out whether you have a healthy percentage of body fat. An acceptable range is 25 to 31 percent if you're male, or 18 to 24 percent if you're female, according to the American Council on Exercise. Ask your doctor what a safe body-fat percentage is for you.
Lean Body Weight
What's left over when you subtract your body fat from your overall weight is your lean body weight. This includes your organs, bones, muscles and every other part of your body. Differentiating exactly how much muscle mass you have in relation to these other parts of your body must take into account your body type, organ size and other physical factors particular to you. However, your doctor can perform a body-composition measurement to estimate what percentage of your body is muscle.
Significance
A body-composition measurement determines how much lean body mass, or muscle, you have. This information can help you design appropriate exercise and eating plans if you need to gain or lose weight. For athletes, maintaining a proper percentage of body fat helps improve their performance because burning fat for energy is more efficient than burning muscle for energy. Also, muscle mass is harder to replace than fat.
Typical Muscle Mass Percentages
One way to estimate body composition is to perform a skinfold measurement, which requires an expert to pinch key areas of your body and measure the bunched skin. A study that appeared in a 1993 issue of the "Journal of Sports Science and Medicine" used a combination of skinfold and limb measurements to estimate the muscle mass among men of varying levels of fitness. For bodybuilders, the muscle mass as a percentage of body mass was 65.1 percent. For the nonathletic group, the muscle-mass percentage was 56.5 percent of total body mass.
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