six percent body fat is ideal for men that's who actually Knocks motherfucker you better hope we don't meet in person I'm kidding or am I hey folks Dr Mike here for Renaissance periodization and today's video is about the ultimate thing that we all want to know how to roughly tell your body fat or if you're creepy like that somebody else's body fat without any monitoring or skin fold calipers or tape measures or dexa scans or even without having to wait in the apartment across from theirs with a telescope days on end soaked in your own
juices just waiting for them to take their clothes off yes I do understand that it is both unethical and illegal to do these things but we can all fantasize so here we go quick caveat before we start going through the different kinds of body fat ranges and telling you what you can probably expect to look like there is quite a bit of individual variation on how people store their fat some people will look really lean in a ton of their body and you're like dude you're at 10 but they have a really well I'll just
say it fat ass or really fatty thighs or a lot of fat in their gut love handles Etc and then their overall let's say they go get a dexa there's like 12 you're like really dude you look like you're eight well yeah but have you seen this and they show you the love handle and you're like haha that looks 25 I guess it makes sense with the rest of you so that's a big deal another thing is nothing beats technically the MRI but after that nothing beats the dexa and whatever you think someone's body fat
is if they've had a dexa that's the best answer almost always like very rarely in some really contest conditioning circumstances the Decks that can be a little bit illusory and the eyeball is better but almost never is that the case and because of these differences and these especially ways in which people store their body fat when I go down this list this is not a checklist if we have these things we're looking for you're this body fat type of situation it's more of a helpful guide that makes you a little bit less wrong and a
little bit more right you'll notice that these are in five to ten percent increments just to make our discussion simpler and also make us more likely to be correct with a bit of a margin of error all right here we go we're going to go through one of these for the gentleman and then one of these uh for the ladies what's up ladies anyway I'm getting ahead of myself here we go 30 plus we will not go higher than this because then you're just gee whiz you know you just got a lot going on which
is sweet but there's a lot of you which is great thirty percent Plus or in this case you know 30 31 32 all the way to 35 ish as a male you can expect in many cases fat overhang such as your love handles fat overhang on your lower tummy and fat droopy fat deposits that droopy droopy but visible grabable fat deposits under places like your chest your lats Etc and in most cases you don't have any visible muscle separation so if you see someone on World's Strongest Man and their arm just looks like a thing
that has no separation they're probably in that close to 30 if not higher range absolutely a thing dropping down to the 25 to 30 percent body fat range in many cases probably in most but not all the time you might have some fat overhang but possibly no overhang just a smooth layer of fat especially if you're young or have the genetics for that sort of thing because some people store a lot of fat in their abdomen and 25 to 30 percent they're gonna have some overhang but their arms are being weirdly lean at other people
store their fat more around their whole body and then you're like I don't look lean or not lean you just kind of look like you're there that might be more of a thing if you were pretty jacked at 25 to 30 percent people can tell that you have big dealts big arms and big legs then they now look distinctly like they're not made entirely of fat like if you have a dude who's like five nine 270 pounds and is like pretty jacked but has 27 body fat you don't look at him in especially in like
a t-shirt or a tank top and you're like that guy's just pure fat you're like yeah I look like a bouncer or something he's definitely got some shit there that looks like must 20 to 25 percent you typically don't have any more overhanging fat just kind of the smooth fat that lies around evenly but there's not really any separation of muscle subsections yet so what 20 to 25 percent you'll probably won't be able to see your rear delts from your front delts you won't be able to see the different parts of your back the rhomboids
traps and lats Etc it's just all kind of be one incrementally now more shapely mess of muscle you're almost certainly not going to see the three quads forget about seeing your hamstrings that's highly unlikely if however you are very jacked at that percent fat you can see your arms this thing here start to separate a little bit from your delts you can tell a distinct separation because your waist is now a little bit narrower in your lower and upper back especially if you're jacked enough for your lats to flare out they won't look like lats
but they look like bigger things you can start to tell your chest from your lats if you're viewing from the front and side so some kind of semblance of shape is starting to hit us at 20 to 25 percent at 15 to 20 fat for males you might start to see a semblance of shape to your midsection perhaps a few ab-like structures at this point in a long-term fat loss Journey if you're starting out pretty fat when you get into that 16 17 body fat range this is the first time where you're like oh my
fucking god am I seeing something that looks like ABS it's like getting really excited to drive to Chicago I don't know what the fuck that would ever be exciting and you start to see the Willis Tower or whatever the fuck it's called now Sears Tower back in the day like from 30 miles away and you're like oh my fucking God I can't tell anything but that's one big ass building Chicago you can't see Chicago yet but you're getting hints you can't see your abs yet in most cases but there's some kind of shape there a
little bump here a little thing there the waste is coming down is starting to look like something is happening in most cases here you'll start to see visible triceps so if you flex your tricep people can tell there's like at least two heads in there separate from the bicep delts clearing up from the rest of the arm and from the side especially when flexing you can start to tell that there's a distinct quad and a distinct hamstring all right get in there get in there now here's where the fun starts to happen 10 to 15
fat in most cases somewhere in that range most people will have visible ABS that is to say a six-pack which is awesome you're even going to get a few veins here and there sometimes people have quite a few veins at 10 to 15 but not dependably I'll say almost everyone will have some veins that are visible at 10 to 15 especially like the uh various veins on your biceps forearms Sometimes some shit gets through the chest some leg veins Maybe most major muscles are now distinct from one another people can see your lats and generally
your upper back at least is different than your lower back they can see that your lats are different than your mid-back they can see your traps perched on high by themselves delts biceps triceps forearms you can see that there's hamstring muscles the quads the glutes are now generally separate from the hamstrings there's no flow anymore so most of the major muscle groups are distinct from one another this is one of the reasons not the top reason to buy a long shot most bodybuilders won't Mass up to higher than 15 fat because bodybuilders like to check
their physiques to see how their improvements are coming along in the off season and if you can't tell major muscle groups from one another gee whiz you're not really bodybuilding anymore in any straight sense so a lot of times that 10 to 15 range you're looking fluffy in the sense that you're smooth but man you can definitely tell all the muscles apart from each other was kind of like minimum safe distance from that uh contest prep kind of thing and for many people not all some of the muscle parts are going to become visible like
if you flex your quad properly you'll have three visible surface quads if you flex your hamstrings right and especially if you're somebody who doesn't store a lot of fat in the hams you can just start to see some hamstring details so like okay like this is a really really exciting thing five to ten percent by the way as far as fractions of your fat Mass go imagine uh sorry let me let me finish the thought as fractions go even though we're going five to five percent down each time in this list five percent constitutes a
bigger and bigger fraction of whatever fat you have left so if you go from 22 to 17 definitely look different if you go from 17 to like 12 percent you look really different if you go from 12 to like seven percent you're a fucking completely different person if you go from seven percent to like three or four percent of the dexa You're Not a Human Being anymore so the changes get faster and faster or more profound looking as you get leaner because every single five for sure percent every single percent of body fat represents a
bigger fraction of the fat you have left it's like you're looking at uh oh let's see a strength of a division of a military that's a hundred people if you chop off five people at a time you know 100 people is almost the same strength as 95 people 90 people can still put up a good fight if you got 15 guys and you lose five of them 10 guys is really different from 15 as far as operational capability versus 100 to 95. and if you got 10 guys you go down to Five Guys oh my
fucking god that's half of your Force that's the same impressiveness as going from 100 to 50 people on your military squad or whatever so as you get leaner you'll be able to see more intense changes now it's tougher to get leaner but it's one of these things where uh I'm basically trying to explain the fact that we were at 15 to 20 and it was like oh yeah you'll see some stuff 10 to 15 you're going pretty good folks five to ten is where the nonsense begins and that's not just comes out of nowhere it's
the fact that to get from 15 to 9 you've lost like Chi whiz over a third of your remaining body fat which is a ton of fat so here we go five to ten percent for male for males veins often all over veins everywhere clear ABS your serratus and obliques are clearly visible the muscles are all completely separated nothing's Lost in Translation many of the muscles will be strided cross-strided when you're flexing them when you are pumped your skin color can change very radically it'll go from just you being whatever color you are especially if
you're a Caucasian to like a weird off pinkish red to other people like what the fuck like a really lean person in the gym they get really lean they pull a shirt off they're like that really like your what your skin looks like holy shit it happens with Naturals happens even more with enhanced people for other various reasons but even for natties the skin starts to look a little different when you're that lean when you're pumped when you're not pumped if you're enhanced your skin always looks weird if you're natural you look kind of normal
at this point five to ten percent your face really starts to get leaned for most people and it's getting leaner the whole time but kind of in a way that people can tell like if you show up to work and all of a sudden you know you took like six weeks off to go to a project somewhere you did a crazy diet you came back and your co-workers have seen you for the time and you're at eight percent body fat they're gonna be like damn you look like a different person what the hell happened to
your face that's kind of cool but holy shit so it's a really really big deal now here's where the insanity begins sub five percent me personally my best dexa has been at Five Point something so I've never gotten here hopefully in this next contest prep I'll get a good whack at it just not that many people in the world have ever gotten here what does that look like first of all you're riddled with veins in most cases some people have genetics for not so many veins but most people have absurd veins at this point when
you are pumped or warm your veins have veins like if you're in a warm gym or you get into the sauna after getting a good pump when you pull your shirt off and you're a four percent body fat you're gonna be like you could stare at a person for a long time if you're like on psychedelic mushrooms or something you're like bro they're super highways in your shit veins and the little veins and little tiny veins everywhere it looks like uh parchment paper almost you're just like I don't know dang it fuck is going on
with your body it doesn't look normal it's not something like where like a typical girl will be like oh my God like Brad Pitt so lean like in Fight Club he looks good if you see someone who's a four percent body fat training at your gym and you're that girl you're not gonna be like oh my God you're so lean you're just gonna be like what the fuck happen they are girls in any case who cares that bitch thinks cross striations will be everywhere including your triceps in many cases quads glutes here's the big difference
on average between people in a five to ten percent range and people in the sub five percent range five to ten they have amazing situations when they Flex sub five distractions when they flex your nonsense but even when just walking across the stage or walking across the gym and they're moving their arms you can see their tricep striations come and go if they've got their posing trunks on you can see their glutes stride and unstride every step they take it's weird you're like holy fucking shit you are literally like pretty much out of body fat
it's nonsense at every level the face at this point looks like death like it doesn't look like you're lean it's like oh like oh they look like Willem Dafoe or Maria Shriver or whatever like it's like clearly visible parts of your skeleton and it just doesn't look it looks disconcerting their eyes are sunken in they often have like sort of Droopy shit going on it's a huge trip if you are Caucasian a lot of times at this level if you have a pump especially your veins are clearly visible in a hue of blue so you
just like pale white motherfucker and there's little blue things going on it's really trippy very very exotic almost nobody gets there but I will say for most professional contests amateur contests getting to the bottom of the five to ten percent range is all you'll ever need to do really really well this is that extra extra you see a guy at your show that has remotely any muscle mass and he comes in at some five percent he's that guy won the show because it just doesn't look right all right ladies preview the ladies will have some
different appearances because they store body fat differently in the higher body fat ranges but as the body fat starts to come off they start to mirror more and more of the responses more visual cues that we looked for in males females will start to get a lot of those as well I'll put it in a more simple way when males and females are both in that five percent region they'll look the fucking same they ain't no more fucking you know sexually mediated fat tissue bitch you don't have hips they don't have titties when they're that
fucking mean nobody nobody's got shit anymore they're just like stare at each other and if you put five some five percent men and women into a room naked usually you don't even have any sexual relations they just stare at each other and sit down and just look at the wall and when food comes in they go oh my God and that's all that you can expect out of that sort of thing so ladies at 30 plus often times not always the bra and undies make distinct fat pinches where you have fat spillover which nobody wants
to know this but is absolutely one of my top tier things I'm looking for good good God Scott the video guy talk myself into a into a into excitement here I love it I love it lean girls it's nice that you do this Namaste but in any case oh uh no visible muscle separation in most cases a 30 plus and at this level depending on your genetics you can either have really big huge wide hips and waist or sorry big huge hips and glutes and thighs or you can have relatively normal hips and thighs and
glutes but your waist is wide enough for there not to be as much of an hourglass appearance though if you want The Hourglass shape getting a bit leaner than 30 plus is usually a a good idea is what you want to do to get that effect that you want at 25 to 30 percent for females they're still often no clear muscle separation people might not be able to tell that you lift weights if you're really into lifting weights but your shape is coming in and your waist generally starts to narrow significantly versus hips this is
where in people's transformational Journeys they start to really feel like in clothes they look shapely and it's an awesome super super inspirational thing for a lot of females especially that have been uh quite high in body fat for a large fraction of their life the first time they get into that 25 to 30 Zone they're like okay okay okay okay okay ah shit's happening for sure right 20 to 25 percent the shape starts to become really distinct this is actually quite lean for Roman accounting for the secondary sexual characteristics of breast gluteal and thigh body
fat that women have much more than males do on average if you obviate for that it's really much more of what a male would look like at 15 to 20 percent so you get a lot of shape that's distinct there's no large fat deposits left in many cases here outside of the breasts and glute slash thighs and some upper body muscles uh because females tend to have much leaner upper bodies in the lower bodies uh can be distinct especially when lifting like a girl who is a 23 body fat when she does lateral raises you're
like damn bitch got shoulders we've got triceps and biceps and delts you can start to see that stuff separate out a little bit 15 to 20 for females very likely you're getting into four pack if not six-pack territory at this point your waste is starting to get really really tight if you have really good genetics for abs you got abs at this point somewhere in that range in most cases you're going to have visible triceps delts are clearing up from the rest of the arm if you're just relaxed in a tank top walking around the
store people are like damn bitch got fucking God damn who's jacked now people can tell um the hams and quads are now visible separately from each other and often separately from the glutes technically speaking this is often the healthiest body fat for most females to occupy somewhere north of 15 below that a lot of times you get cessation of the Menses amenorrhea and all kinds of not ideal things for the long term and it's often the most universally attractive like if you pull a thousand men with different pictures of females generally they'll pick anywhere between
15 fat to 25 fat skewed a little bit to the 15 to 20 uh as the most attractive they don't know what the fuck they're looking for they don't care about body fat at all it's the shape and the look that they're looking for most of the time the best shape that simultaneously looks the healthiest is available for many females in that 15 to 20 range so without putting too fine a point on it if you're a female you have no competitive aspirations and you don't want to take the slight Health downsides of getting much
leaner than this you just want to be fucking jacked and beautiful and hot and live your best life a goal of anywhere between 15 and 20 fat to just be at or cycle around in is fucking probably it um if you're a female and you're in the fitness space A lot of times you have to deal with the noise of the males talking about what body fat is ideal and you'll have like I think there's Scott's video I think there was like a literally maybe I don't want to put it on him but it sounds
like some shit he'd say an athlete x video that was like seven percent body fat is the ideal body fat for men which by the way is a literal nonsense seven percent you don't feel like a man anymore you feel like a broken machine but women will see that and they'll be like oh my God I gotta get to at least 10 percent and that's not a thing because let me tell you about what 10 has uh coming six percent body fat is ideal for men harsh truth exclamation point six percent body fat is ideal
for men that's who athlean X motherfucker you better hope we don't meet in person I'm kidding or am I I'm kidding of course um that's about oh that's fucking literal nonsense it's totally insane there's no oh my God most good athletes are in that 10 to 15 range depending on the sport sometimes the eight to twelve percent range Marathon hours can be six percent but Jesus Christ that's the only fucking sport you need to be that lean in go watch D1 wrestling and tell me how many of the guys are at six percent body fat
it's this fucking nonsense so okay here we go training for muscle growth is never going to be the same 10 to 15 percent for females you got visible ABS in most cases I mean like almost all cases your waist often looks very lean and very small you're starting to get veins that are more prominent you really can't avoid the veins at this body fat percent and some women don't like the look of veins and that's something to take into consideration most if not all of your major muscle groups are very distinct from each other you
can tell delts from triceps or biceps forms Etc most or sorry some muscle parts will become visible oftentimes if you have the right genetics many muscle parts like three visible quads hand detail Etc the face will now start to look much leaner than the average woman there is a reason that bikini Olympians and figure girls get a ton of face filler I think it's a great look some people don't like it but if they didn't get the face filler they would kind of look all like Willem Dafoe on stage which is shit that's fucking my
fantasy but you know that's not everyone else's look what I'm saying is is that a 10 to 15 percent in most cases you don't look like cute little fucking gym Bebop or bitch you look like you're on your way to something real serious you do a set of rows and you turn the guy's like ma'am I look away or be like you getting ready for a show this is that's the body fat percent of people like you getting ready for a show or do you just compete or are you gonna do a show tomorrow really
really not the look that describes uh many people's ideal for feminine Health and Beauty I could give a fuck for ideals that's all your individual choice but just reporting from from the statistical uh averages here and 10 to 15 is below the roughly 15 body fat Mark below which your body decides it's too lean to give you periods anymore it causes a long-term uh Slow Bone Mass loss a bunch of other health stuff nothing crazy you can get into this 10 to 15 fat and even lower as a female every now and again to do
a show or really like look ridiculous for no reason at all except for your own perception or desire but it's not it's not somewhere you want to live you don't want to live there you want to live as a female above 15 it's kind of like in Mountaineering I forgot what altitude it is I think maybe eighteen thousand feet don't kill me in the comments let me know in the comments which the altitude but there's an altitude above which you just yeah you actually just can't sustain yourself as a human the oxygen saturation isn't high
enough so like you're just timing out like a couple months later everyone up there dies except for like gurkhas or some shit like that and then for them it's like eight months for you it's four so there's like uh altitude below that which was like which has the highest living human subpopulations that just actually live at that altitude flipping that around for females 15 on average people get away with all kinds of weird stuff with exceptions 15 plus is where you want to live as a female occasionally dipping lower if you would like but this
is officially unhealthy if you're a female and you tell me your 11 body fat I'm very sweet what's your how long are you gonna be here for him well I just love living here I'll be like let me Avail you to some of the downsides there five to ten percent and some five percent for females is almost identical to what it is for males because all the body fats north of here have stripped the female of almost all if not all of her secondary sexual characteristic fat like breast tissue glute tissue thigh tissue now you
just look female still but you don't look like you have a terrible affinity for one gender or the other everyone in a certain body fat level just looks really fucking lean so just to review a five to ten percent if you're female you can expect veins pretty much all over clear ABS serratus obliques you are going to have completely separated muscles that often have striations when you Flex them your skin color is going to look trippy when you're pumped your face looks really really lean everyone can tell you're not the average person anymore and of
course sub five percent which is very difficult for females to hit because that body fat the secondary sexual characteristic body fat they tries to hang around as much as possible to keep your ass surviving uh it eventually goes on everyone it you know there's probably a handful of women that have reached some five percent body fat maybe not a handful maybe a couple hundred over the course of competitive bodybuilding but there are pictures of girls which throw in there you're like that bitch is whatever fuck she wants to be there's zero body fat on that
person I can believe a number of three percent that does happen I've personally me administer to dexa to a figure competitor that looked like the five to ten range here and she was at seven percent so I mean look like if she just continued to diet for five or ten more weeks she could have nailed four point something so it is possible riddled with veins when you're pumped or warm your veins have veins it's really freaky crosstrations are everywhere you see a female at four percent bite down you can see a crosstraded masseter muscle face
looks like total death on females it's a really trippy look because um there's a sociological almost Universal the the kind of puffy faced uh female I don't mean puffy in a derogatory sense I mean like a full healthy face it's actually one of the universal characteristics of attractiveness where male male will see a woman with a full face and think that confers not think uh infer completely subconsciously that that confers reproductive and youth advantages and so it's considered universally pretty attractive usually the the Willem to foe face isn't something that I think it's fucked great
but it usually doesn't fly with as many um people of the same or opposite sex that are attracted to people is what I'm trying to say um but it'll look very very profound like if you see a male with very distinct cheekbones and kind of like strung out and you can see his teeth through his face you're like yeah that guy's fucking you know shit happens you see a female like that you're gonna be like holy fuck because females are typified statistically by a slightly higher body fat percentage everywhere including their face they're further away
from their own Norm when they're at sub five percent than males are males are also very far away but not quite as far away right like if you saw uh a 3 000 pound giraffe you'd be like God think that's how much they're supposed to weigh if you saw a 3 000 pound horse you'd be like holy fucking shit that is really a big horse so kind of the same idea for females here the face look for females short of filler and even with filler something a little bit missing there at some pie percent the
face looks it's a trip I encourage you to check that out and again if you're Caucasian female you can see the blue in your veins and if you're Asian or African-American or any other race female you just look fucking absurd in the most amazing way possible but in a way that I must say is no longer healthy now males generally can maintain very good health into the sub 10 range lower than about seven or eight percent for most males they're gonna have Androgen hormones start to really fall off it's not necessarily unhealthy it just means
you lose muscle and fat for a while longer and they don't have the best training or the best recovery or the best sleep or the best anything but for females getting that lean is particularly nasty because it shuts down the cycle that is you know the female period and all of the attended consequences that that has so I don't want to be too much of a health pretty sure we all know what we're getting ourselves into so to wrap this up up a few things one these are all averages and just guides if someone brings
you a daxa and it's a real accident and fake it and it says Hey like I'm 11 they're actually 11 if they don't look eleven percent that's your problem not theirs right then it turns out oh yeah Mike said that variation was pretty great someone at 11 could look fucking stage ready sometimes it's weird how that happens somebody at 11 could look like they're 17 and you're like you're not really 11 it's like no I sure should am a lot of times people store body water so people can get an 11 daxa because it sees
through water to actual tissue and you're like bullshit you're not you're not fucking you're like 17 you're not 11 they do a water cut and you're like oh my God would you do to lose all that fat like nothing I didn't do any fat loss it was one week I just caught the water and then boom I'm shredded I told you it was 11 yeah okay so it is so there's a lot of stuff there just think of these as averages another thing just slowly cautiously meticulously and in phases of roughly five percent to seven
percent body fat loss at any one time before a break get to whatever body fat level makes you happy there's not really any wrong answers here it's just trade-offs none of these are better five percent fat isn't better I've been at just over five percent fat before they don't give you a trophy for that you just look at yourself in the mirror and you're like this is cool but you don't have any more energy to think about a lot of stuff so you're like I'm over it and if it's like you're jammed to be seven
percent run around and flex everyone amazing you need that fucking karmic therapy for your own soul get that shit but that's not like right or wrong answers I don't want this video to be misconstrued as being like Oh Mike says females should be five to ten percent or ideally above 15 or whatever that's all your personal judgment call we run this channel for adults you're all adults you're all smart you're all responsible make intelligent choices check in when you're doing a contest prep with some sort of healthcare provider get your blood work done don't do
anything stupid and be smart and enjoy your life and everybody five percent because at the end of the day maybe if aliens come down you're like yeah we don't like that person because they're too fat they're going to be like what the fuck is wrong with you guys and you don't want to piss off the aliens they have phaser guns yeah in any case if you like more nerdy stuff folks we have a members channel members part of this channel that has extra videos every week for usually more nerd-like content deep into the throes of
sport physiology we also have the team full ROM Forum that is that next level of nerdiness and you can get all of your questions about training and diet answered we can actually look at pictures of your body in our forum and give you some combination of advice on what to do next and just like snide criticisms like yeah you look okay dot dot I'm kidding we're all super positive super supporting tons of diet stuff tons of training stuff in there it's all one low monthly fee of nine trillion dollars it's gonna come down with inflation
uh if you like that that's all Below in the comments or sorry in the description get in the comments tell us what you think tell us wrong tell us you hate us tell us you love us just say something like comment subscribe see you guys next time
