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greenmedic88 on 19 October 2009
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KingArthur said:
greenmedic88 said:
Hockey and tackle football players are almost the reverse when it comes to weight. When the trend in the NFL was to have bigger and bigger linemen, NFL players had to literally eat their way into making the cut and keep eating to stay there.

Of course it takes a lot of calories to maintain high muscle mass. Bodybuilders are notorious for this.

Check the chart out though; none are listed as being over 20% (not including women who have a different scale for body fat %).

http://www.sport-fitness-advisor.com/bodyfatpercentage.html

Feeling fatter yet?! lol

Feeling fatter? Absolutely not. :)

I can only comment about the hockey part of that table. We have roughly 60 players on our team/reservers. 2 of us have body fat percentage 9 or less. 9 of us have bf% higher than 15%. Those are measured when we start our training after summer so those results are a bit high. So that table looks ok for hockey players.

Anyhow, the table shows that ideal body fat percentage for non-athletes is 9-15%. Do you really think that 20% would be unhealthy?

 

The key thing you mentioned was that the body fat stats were taken pre-season, which is the equivalent of weighing in after a summer vacation; almost everyone, barring the freakishly trim or those with compulsive gym work ethics aren't going to start training anywhere near peak condition (probably those 2 lean guys).

9-15% seems a bit low for non-athletes, but I'm thinking I'd just LIKE to believe that so that I could be content at around 16% when not actively training. I'm not content at 16% though; I know for a fact I should drop about 5lbs of fat to be in competitive condition which would put me closer to 12% or less. And that would be before the build up immediately leading up to a sanctioned bout.

The reason that probably seems low is because averages have Americans as being a fair degree higher than those numbers. But really all that means is that the average American has a higher percentage of body fat than they need or should have.

Tanita (who manufactures body fat/water percentage scales) suggests anything past 20% for men is past "healthy." The average for normal, non-athletes is supposedly closer to 22% for men (7-10% over).