In a lab on the bottom floor of the Student Recreation Center, a wrestler has a test done to check his body composition.

He takes his shirt off in order to let Audra Frericks, graduate assistant in the ATP lab, perform a skin fold test to measure how much of his body is made of fat. She uses a skin fold caliper to pinch his skin in three different areas on his body: his tricep, his subscap and his abdomen. She tests each area at least twice and records the average for each.

He wants to see where he stands, because the NCAA rules state that a collegiate wrestler cannot go below 7 percent body fat, Frericks said.

She then enters the information into the computer, including his weight, gender and age, and test results for each of the three skin folds. Then, the computer calculates a body fat percentage.

“It’s pretty easy,” said Dexter Johnson, senior sports management major and member of the wrestling team. “It doesn’t take that long, only like one or two minutes.”

Women need a body fat percentage of about 18 to 25 percent, while men need 12 to 18 percent to stay healthy, Frericks said.

“You can have certain health risks if your body fat is too high,” Johnson said. “(Also) the lower you go there are health risks.”

Although there is still a 3 to 5 percent margin of error with this test, body composition is a better indicator of whether or not a person is in good shape than other tests that are more easily available online.

The body mass index, or BMI, calculator can be found on Web sites like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, www.cdc.gov. BMI calculators take a person’s height and weight measurements and give them a number, placing them in a range from underweight to obese.

“The equation to calculate it is your weight in kilograms divided by your height squared,” said Brian Pritschet, physical education professor.

A score below 18.5 indicates that a person is underweight, 18.5 to 24.9 is normal, 25 to 29.9 is overweight and anything above 30 is obese.

A person who is 6’3″ and weighs 220 pounds has a BMI of 27.5, placing him into the overweight category.

BMI calculations can sometimes be horribly misleading, Pritschet said. That same person may be extremely muscular with a low body fat percentage.

“Muscle weighs more than fat, therefore a person can have a higher BMI and still be very lean,” Frericks said.

However, for most people who are not athletes or body builders, BMI is generally accurate due to the fact that their fat and muscle distributions are fairly normal, according to Jennifer Taber, nutrition education coordinator.

“For most individuals, especially college students, BMI charts prove quite useful in determining overweight and obesity and any health implications that go with,” she said.

“If you’re wanting to lose weight, you need to know a reasonable amount of pounds to lose,” Pritschet said. “If you gain weight, it’s important to know what the composition of the weight gain is.”

In addition to Eastern athletes and people who are monitoring their weight gain, physical education majors need to have a body composition test done for certain classes in their major.

The test is free for Eastern students, as is a nutritional analysis by Taber and the services of the SRC’s personal trainer.

Information concerning nutritional analysis is available online at www.eiu.edu/~herc/ and students can make an appointment for a body composition test in the ATP lab located in the SRC.

“These services can prove quite beneficial in helping students establish lifelong healthy habits,” Taber said.