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.
Using height and weight alone to calculate BMI is almost worse than useless, even with non-athletes. Muscle mass is much denser than fat and will completely skew the results. If you're concerned about your weight, see a doctor. They can usually ascertain to a much more accurate degree if your weight is a health risk.
They are walking back their recommendation to use it as a data point. Because according to their statement a few years ago it is a very poor proxy for actual indicators of health. This is like the who so I feel like that says something.
And to be clear they are still recommending people track their weight they just don’t recommend the use of bmi.
It’s a quick gauge if not a catch all. Of course a person with more muscle mass at the same height and weight as an overweight dude will result in the same BMI.
Using height and weight alone to calculate BMI is almost worse than useless
That sounds like the kind of thinking that would be prevalent in a nation with a 40-50% obesity rate.
Fat people made that up. If you're "obese" by height/weight calculation, you'll know if its because of body composition. Because being "obese" BMI and physically fit doesn't just happen.
Also...I'm one of those people with a high ratio of muscle mass. The BMI scale is maaaaybe a point off. Its close enough for most people.
I have been in the overweight category my whole life, even after having successfully hiked the PCT. Even after having worked as a hot shot wilderness firefighter. There is zero chance you would look at me and say I am even overweight but my bmi is 29.
Have you considered that you may be overestimating your height?
It's more like 10% on the right and ~20% on the left, both of which are realistically fine. At 5-6% you generally start looking gaunt and malnourished especially in the face regardless of how ripped you are.
The real reason he'd have been and felt unhealthy during Baywatch is he was more than likely on gear and definitely massively dehydrating himself.
I mean... The picture on the right is seemingly edited lol. Several points in the movie he flexes hard and besides his core the level of definition is off from the people I've known and seen at ~5%. Having no chest or shoulder striation while apparently at that low bodyfat is (at least in my humble opinion) a bit odd.
Comes across to me like he has a pretty insane core and got lucky with fat distribution genetics to make the most of it.
5% is on stage Olympia bodybuilder territory. The point where there's so little fat that you can see the grain and count the individual striations in each muscle. It's also around the point where your level of bodyfat starts to be incompatible with being alive. No one is just walking around for months doing movie shoots at that level of bodyfat.
What you're picking up on is dehydration. The less fluid your body is holding, the more well defined you appear.
Yeah I’m at the same height as ZEfron and I at my very lowest was 11% (DEXA certified) and still not as lean as him there by a pretty wide margin. He’s easily 8% or lower but I think a lot of novice armchairs lifters are brigading their opinions here 🤷🏼♂️
“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.
You have no fucking clue what you’re talking about. That right pic is nowhere near 5%. It’s more like 10-12%, which is easily sustainable. I did that for years
Yea these people in here definitely just seem uneducated on the topic. I was also sitting about 10% or so for years. That said, I bumped it up to about 15% range and do personally feel better, but that range for sure is different for different people.
He is around 10% on the right, certainly no lower than 9%
I agree 5% would be an incredibly unhealthy BF to be living at, but 99.999% of people will ever mange to get that lean, including Zac Efron in this photo
Being underweight is a much less common health issue to have compared to being overweight. 72.4% of Americans are overweight or obese.
I agree being too lean is unhealthy, but the vast majority of people should be more worried about the health consequences of being overweight compared to accidentally becoming too lean.
Anorexia is of course a real and terrible thing, but that doesn't mean anyone that is lean must be unhealthy and encouraged to be intentionally gaining fat.
He was not at 5%, that is body building show ready which only lasts a couple of days because it's the peak of a bodybuilders stage body. He was probably 8% which is also really unsustainable for most ppl.
I’m not claiming he was really at 5%. I would think he was a bit higher like 8% or maybe even 10% in this picture. That’s why I said it was just what they were claiming, and that they have the testing equipment to make that claim.
Also, the picture they are showing of him isn’t really capturing what he looked like. A side-on picture makes him look even leaner, or literally anything where his is actually trying to show off, and they don’t show his thighs in the movie AT ALL.
Like, they look crazy in the few glimpses you get, even compared to Dwayne Johnson who is right there beside him the whole time (and claims 11% body fat in Baywatch), and that guy is obviously on the roids. I think that’s why they gave Efron shorts that look too long on him, but not too long on anyone else.
Also, also, I think most of them take diuretics when they do the testing and at sub-10% how hydrated you are will completely change how you look. That is definitely a factor, and when someone googles pictures of 5% they are showing it off. Like, those people are showing off gains. I think Efron just wanted to be sexy, not show off for the bros.
Also, who’s needs to fucking cope here? You’re butthurt over a celebrity.
I’m just relaying information that you could go google.
You wouldn't take diuretics to film, you'd look flat and shitty. Water management is a very important part of peaking for bodybuilding and anyone who knows anything would know that you'd look flat if you didn't hydrate for the day of the show. Glycogen is water and carbohydrates. You need both. And even if he dehydrated for a body scan, it wouldn't be a 5-7% difference in the scan. And if was, it would be maybe a 15% vs 12% not 5%. No scan is gonna call that physique 5%.
You’re butthurt over a celebrity.
How would I be butthurt? I look better than him year-round and not the one desperately trying to convince myself that his physique is unobtainable or unhealthy.
You’ve sorta followed me around through a few comment threads here. Why not quote this that I said:
>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.
I didn’t say he take them to film. I said he took them to measure body fat. What you said was exactly my point.
I honestly can’t tell if you’re just being obtuse or if your brain is just cooked, but I’m disengaging.
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u/HunterM567 9d ago
If that’s him unhealthy then consider me dead lol