What an InBody Scan Actually Tells You (And Why It's More Useful Than the Scales)

If you've been training consistently and the scales aren't reflecting it, you're not imagining things. Weight is a crude measurement, it tells you how much you are, not what you're made of. The difference matters more than most people realise, because two people can weigh exactly the same and have completely different levels of fitness, health risk, and physical capability depending on how that weight is distributed between muscle, fat, and water.

An InBody scan measures the composition rather than the total. It's not a replacement for hard training but it gives you a clearer picture of what that training is actually doing, which makes it considerably more useful than a number on a scale.

What the InBody 270 actually measures

The InBody 270 uses bioelectrical impedance analysis — a low-level electrical current passed through the body — to estimate the composition of different tissues. The printout it produces breaks your body down into six key measurements.

Weight is still there, but it's now a starting point rather than the whole story. On its own it tells you very little. In the context of everything else on the printout, it becomes meaningful.

Skeletal muscle mass is the measurement most people find most motivating, and for good reason. It's a direct indicator of the muscle tissue your body has built, the stuff that makes you stronger, raises your resting metabolic rate, improves insulin sensitivity, and protects your joints as you age. If this number is going up over time, your training is working, regardless of what the scales say.

Body fat mass is the total weight of fat tissue in your body, expressed in kilograms. More useful than a percentage on its own because it tells you the actual quantity of fat, not just its proportion relative to everything else.

Body fat percentage is the ratio of fat to total body weight. Healthy ranges vary by age, sex, and activity level; there's no single number that's universally right, but it gives you a useful benchmark and a way to track change over time.

BMI appears on the printout but is the least useful number on it. BMI doesn't distinguish between muscle and fat, which means a heavily muscled athlete and someone who is sedentary can produce identical BMI scores. Most coaches and fitness professionals treat it as background noise.

Total body water measures hydration at the cellular level, broken down into intracellular water (inside your cells) and extracellular water (outside them). The ratio between these two matters because a higher proportion of intracellular water generally indicates better cellular health and more functional muscle tissue.

How to read your InBody results

The printout can look intimidating the first time. It doesn't need to.

The most useful section is the body composition analysis bar near the top of the page. This shows your weight divided into three segments: body fat mass, skeletal muscle mass, and everything else. What you're looking for over time is the muscle bar extending to the right and the fat bar shortening — that's the direction training and good nutrition moves you in, even if the scales stay roughly the same.

Below that, the obesity analysis section shows your BMI and body fat percentage with shaded ranges indicating where you sit relative to recommended levels. Treat these as reference points rather than verdicts, the trend across multiple scans matters far more than any single reading.

The segmental lean analysis breaks your muscle distribution down by body segment: right arm, left arm, trunk, right leg, left leg. This is particularly useful for spotting imbalances. If your right leg carries significantly more muscle than your left, that's worth addressing in programming, especially if you're training for HYROX where both legs need to perform identically under load.

The visceral fat level is a number between 1 and 20 that estimates the fat surrounding your internal organs. This is the measurement with the most direct health implications, visceral fat is more metabolically active than subcutaneous fat and is more strongly linked to cardiovascular risk and metabolic disease. Keeping this number below 10 is a reasonable target for most people.

Is the InBody scan accurate?

It's accurate enough to be genuinely useful, but not as precise as a DEXA scan.

• DEXA (dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry) is the gold standard for body composition measurement — it uses X-rays to differentiate between bone, fat, and lean tissue with a high degree of precision. It's also expensive, requires specialist equipment, and isn't available in most gyms.

• Bioelectrical impedance, which is what the InBody uses, is accurate to within a few percentage points for most people under consistent conditions. The technology in the InBody 270 is substantially more sophisticated than consumer scales with impedance sensors, it uses eight contact points rather than two, which means it measures each limb and the trunk separately rather than extrapolating from a single reading.

• What affects the accuracy is hydration. The electrical current the InBody uses travels through water, which means your results will vary depending on how hydrated you are at the time of the scan. 

• This is why consistency is important: scan at the same time of day, with similar hydration levels, having eaten similar amounts beforehand. The absolute numbers on any single scan are less important than the trend across scans taken under consistent conditions.

What InBody results can't tell you

The InBody scan doesn't diagnose anything. A high body fat percentage or a low skeletal muscle mass reading is information, not a verdict. It tells you where you are, not what's wrong with you or what you should do about it.

The absolute numbers also matter less than most people expect. Two people with identical skeletal muscle mass readings can have very different physical capabilities depending on how that muscle is trained, how well their nervous system recruits it, and what they do with it. The scan measures quantity, not quality.

What the scan is genuinely good at is tracking change over time. A single reading gives you a snapshot. Three or four readings across six to twelve months, taken under consistent conditions, gives you a trend line — and a trend line tells you whether what you're doing is working.

InBody 270 scans are available at Asset Fitness, Harlow Football Club. Included with Unlimited membership, or available as a standalone. Book yours here.

How to use your results to actually change something

This is where the scan becomes more than an interesting piece of data.

If your body fat percentage is higher than you'd like, the most effective response is rarely to eat less. It's usually to build more muscle because muscle tissue raises your resting metabolic rate, which means your body burns more energy at rest. A training programme that prioritises strength and compound movement, combined with adequate protein, will move your body fat percentage more sustainably than a calorie deficit alone.

If your skeletal muscle mass is lower than expected, the response is progressive resistance training. Compound movements ie. Deadlifts, squats, carries and rows produce the most muscle-building stimulus per unit of training time. Consistency over months matters more than any particular programme.

If your visceral fat level is higher than you'd like, this is the measurement most worth taking seriously from a health perspective. Consistent aerobic training, the kind you get in a functional fitness or HYROX-style session, has a stronger effect on visceral fat than most other forms of exercise.

How often should you rescan? Every eight to twelve weeks is a reasonable frequency for most people. Change happens slowly, rescanning monthly tends to produce anxiety about small fluctuations rather than meaningful insight. Every twelve weeks gives enough time for a genuine trend to emerge.

What rate of change is realistic? In the first few months of consistent training, muscle gain of 0.5–1kg per month is achievable for most people. Body fat loss of 0.5–1% per month is sustainable without sacrificing muscle. These numbers sound modest, but twelve months of consistent progress at that rate produces results that are both visible and durable.

Getting an InBody scan in Harlow

Asset Fitness has the InBody 270 scanner at Harlow Football Club. It's included as standard with Unlimited membership, so if you're already a member, it's there to use. If you want a standalone scan without committing to membership, that's available too.

The scan takes about two minutes. You'll get a full printout on the day, and a coach can walk you through what it means and how to use the results to shape your training. If you're already training at Asset Fitness, bringing your results into a session gives your coach something concrete to work with when designing or adjusting your programme.

Your first class at Asset Fitness is free. If you want to see whether the training environment suits you before committing to anything, that's the most direct way to find out.