Hello and welcome to this episode of the ESG Fitness podcast.

This is going to be a Q&A episode from my incredible clients on Commit 6.

And I have many questions to get through, so I will get started straight away.

The first one says, I know Emma often says the scales aren't a good measure.

Sorry, aren't good at measuring these things,

but mine say skeletal mass is low, but muscle mass is high.

One is attached to bones, but both say resistance train to improve.

I don't understand, can you shed any light on this? Thanks.

So the simple answer here is these machines are nowhere near accurate enough to tell you this sort of information. Most of the homescales use something called

bioelectrical impedance analysis. They send a electrical current through your body and estimate your body composition based on how easily

that current travels. Lean tissue will hold more water and conducts electricity in a slightly

different way than fat tissue does. They're kind of trying to like decipher that from bone versus

muscle versus fat. But they can't direct the measure muscle.

They are estimating it using predictive equations. And the way that they predict those equations is

usually via stats that you would get from average population in a dexter scan and even dexter scans have inaccuracies, right?

So they're estimating information based on an already inaccurate measure.

So you can see where there's like levels and levels of inaccuracy coming in.

The other thing that impacts this is your hydration levels, your salt intake, your carbohydrate

intake, the time of day, where you are in your menstrual cycle,

like all of these things can impact the reading.

So just be very aware that there's quite a lot of variability in the results that you're

going to get and it's very unlikely that it would be able to accurately predict muscle mass,

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