Lean Body Mass, Muscle Mass, and Muscle Percentage

Ever wonder what all that fitness jargon means? Me too.

If you want to learn how to calculate your Lean Body Mass, click here. I wrote a post about calculating Lean Body Mass and your ideal weight a few days ago.

Now onto the question of muscle mass. It seems obvious that muscle mass is the amount of muscle present in your body, and that a muscle percentage statistic would show you the percentage of your body that muscle mass takes up. From all of the googling I've done, this seems to be the case, but when you pose the question of calculating these numbers, they don't tend to agree!

Let me explain. I just bought a body composition scale. In fact, I bought this one:

It's a Beurer Body Analysis Scale.

Anyway, some scales measure muscle mass and some scales measure muscle percentage. Mine measures muscle percentage. I have also used a scale that measures muscle mass. Here's where it can get confusing. I googled how to calculate muscle mass, and instead the few websites I found seemed to be giving me a formula for calculating lean body mass, which I already know how to calculate (see previous post). The formulas would use your body fat percentage and simply figure out what your supposed muscle mass is by subtracting your BF% from your total weight... but that leaves all the other stuff in your body in that number as well like bones, veins, and whatever else is in there. Then, somehow, I got a number that seemed close to what a previous scale had given me for muscle mass, but it seemed wrong too because if you took my body fat mass and my supposed muscle mass and added them together, there were only about 4 lbs left over to account for bones and stuff. I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure that all the bones in my body probably weigh more than 4 lbs.

So I'm still lost, unfortunately. If anyone can explain to me how these scales measure muscle mass vs muscle percentage, that would be awesome. If it's exactly what it sounds like and the 2 scales that measured the 2 different statistics on me are just miles apart with regard to accuracy, I can understand that too.

I think that the closest I've gotten to a real muscle mass is actually by using the muscle percentage provided by the scale I own. This number seems to take into account my body fat percentage while also leaving out bones, blood and vessels, and non-muscle organs like skin. If my scale is reasonably correct, my muscle% is 29.4% or right around 51 lbs of muscle.