Dr. Andy Galpin

And then really for this conversation, the most challenging part about that is it is extremely unrealistic for most people to do.

This would cost you a ton of money and be very challenging to get access to.

So it's not a real viable solution for most people.

That said, new technologies are coming online.

There are companies like Springbok, which allow you to do exactly what I just talked about.

So this is a full body MRI, and this is quite different than using something to say scan for early cancer diagnosis or something like that.

This is really for the assessment of muscle quantity.

And so you can go to an MRI, it takes about an hour or so, and they will be able to capture and image each individual muscle you have in your body

and give you a visual in three-dimension feedback of the muscle volume of them, which again allows you to compare, say, all the muscles in your rotator cuff to each other, compare the one on the right side to the left side, front side to back side, et cetera, et cetera.

These are available throughout at least America right now in a number of MRI facilities.

It is quite expensive still for the average consumer, and it's not usable and available again worldwide.

So if you want, though, to go after a gold standard, that would probably be your best bet.

If that's not available or you're more interested in something that can be used anywhere, you have a couple of other options.

And those would be things like your appendicular muscle mass measurement or your fat-free mass.

Now, both of those metrics can be used to create what's called an index.

In a second here, I'm going to tell you what some of those standard numbers are.

And those are widely available based on your age or sex to be able to get an idea of where you should be at on those scales.

But quickly, when I say appendicular, what I'm talking about is basically how much muscle do you have in the appendices, so your arms and legs.

That differs from your fat-free mass index, and it's important for me to point out that's not necessarily representative of your total amount of skeletal muscle.

That actually can be measured in other ways, and it would be a separate idea.