Understanding Basal Metabolic Rate
Understanding your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) is important because it explains when generic scales are an important form of measurement and where they’re not.
Maybe you’re currently eating dinner, or sat in a coffee shop, or even 30,000 ft up above the rest of us, but wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, every living being on this planet as a Basal Metabolic Rate, which is referred to commonly as ‘BMR’.
Your BMR is the amount of calories your body expends per day just literally living, carrying out its daily functions to survive, and this is important to understand due to knock on effect it has to the amount of calories you need ingest per day to just break even.
So, how do you measure your BMR?
Grab a piece of paper and write down the two following things.
Your height in centimeters:
Your weight in kilograms:
Your age in years:
In our examples, we are using fictional persons named Tom and Lisa.
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Tom will have the following stats.
- Height in centimeters: 178
- Weight in kilograms: 78.6
- Age in years: 37
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Lisa will have the following stats.
- Height in centimeters: 178
- Weight in kilograms: 78.6
- Age in years: 33
BMR Equation For Men
BMR = (height in centimeters x 6.25) + (weight in kilograms x 9.99) – (age x 4.92) + 5
So if you plugged all Tom’s info into the equation, you would get:
(178 x 6.25) + (78.6 x 9.99) – (37 x 4.92) + 5 = 1,721
Tom’s number of 1,721 is his BMR, it is also essentially his necessary calories per day for living.
BMR Equation For Women
BMR = (height in centimeters x 6.25) + (weight in kilograms x 9.99) – (age x 4.92) – 161
If you plug all Lisa’s info into the equation, you would get:
(178 x 6.25) + (78.6 x 9.99) – (33 x 4.92) – 161 = 1,574
Lisa’s number of 1,574 is her BMR, it is also essentially her necessary calories per day for living.
What Was your BMR?
From here you’re in a position to not only discover your BMR but to also apply it to your dieting, and understand how much you’re expending already!
Is Calculating Your Basal Metabolic Rate BMR still Useful?
When looking at logging measurement in reference to our body composition, generic scales receive a lot of attention and for good reason as for decades they’ve caused confusion, discomfort and neglect amongst the fitness industry, guys and girls just as much as one another.
Generic scales measure your weight, and that’s the only variable they measure. They don’t take your age into account, nor your height and even deeper, they don’t measure the % of fat vs muscle in your body.
So when you step on the scales and measure up, and then your peer does the same, and you feel as if you’re slightly inadequate to then, its best to delve deeper to understand what the number staring up back at you means…
- Did you know muscle weighs more than fat? It’s true, it genuinely does, so first and foremost, you could have more muscle mass than your peer, sounds good no?
- Are you taller than your peer? Well, that will most certainly have something to do with how heavy you are, the taller the individual the more bone mass they have, and the more weight they will naturally carry.
- Are you older than your peer? The older we get the more our metabolism changes, growth hormone production lessens and our body changes, to a point where we find it much harder to shift excess weight.
These are only a few points to help you understand that generic scales are the worst way to measure yourself, UNLESS, you’re competing competitively in sport and are performing in a certain weight class, then you’re most certainly validated to use them.
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