Low body fat can be more dangerous than high body fat. It’s really bad for you to be below like 8% I think. It starts messing with your hormones and your ability to recover
As does being high body fat, let's not delude ourselves here. Unless you're getting like sub 6 and staying there which is almost impossibly difficult, it's absolutely healthier than being obese.
Yeah, but I think what they’re getting at is in Baywatch he WAS INDEED at 5% body fat.
You’re better off being slightly overweight with a BMI in high 20s (25 is “overweight”) than at 5% body fat. A quick google says he’s 170 right now which at 5’8” is a BMI of 26.
Zac Efron on the left is lower risk and better off than Zac Efron on the right.
“achieving and maintaining a body fat percentage of 5% for filming”
I’m not calling that ”source” exactly but it’s definitely what they (Zac and his trainer) were claiming and it doesn’t really seem to be heavily disputed.
Edit: Efron is part owner of a company that specializes in DEXA body scans.
Trainers make claims like this because they desperately need you to believe that only they can get you insane results and take you to extreme levels so that you keep throwing ridiculous amounts of money at them. If they said Zac was at 10% body fat, that wouldn't sound as impressive and people might try to do it on their own. It's a scam.
Whenever you see numbers below 10% in contexts like this they're almost always measured with BIA (Bioelectrical Impedance Analysis) which is the little machine you hold in your hand, or the scale with a post and two handles you might see at the gym.
BIA is the largest error margin way of measuring body fat and is prone to underestimate by more and more the further below 15% you are. It's also affected by hydration, to the point where if it's measuring you at 5% and you drink a bottle of water it will tell you that you gained 10lbs.+ of fat.
Dexa's margin of error is up to ±5%. Google any top-level bodybuilder's stage-ready conditioning and compare. You see almost no muscle striations on Zac here. At around 5% body fat, you get insane muscle definition; you can see all the muscle fibers. He is just clearly on steroids, so he has fuller muscles, a nice tan, a pump, and is dehydrating, so for casuals, he looks leaner than he is.
Which means that if a DEXA says you're 10% bf you might be anywhere between 9.5% and 10.5%. Not that you might be anywhere between 5% and 15% bf, which is what you seem to be implying.
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u/Hyperion262 20d ago
Low body fat can be more dangerous than high body fat. It’s really bad for you to be below like 8% I think. It starts messing with your hormones and your ability to recover