Dr. Andy Galpin

So it's important not to confuse you even more, but I do need to add that that is not as simple, maybe, as one would hope.

Your hydration status on the day and other factors like that can't alter it enough.

So again, if you're looking for high precision...

maybe pay attention to that.

But if you're just trying to get an estimate, this is still going to give you phenomenal numbers.

There's also hundreds of papers published on this.

And so you have a great scientific background to give you that context of where you're at.

As an incredibly rough number, when we're looking at that FFMI, so that fat-free mass index score, for men, I generally want to see them coming in at over 20.

And for women, something like 16.5.

Again, this will scale up and down based on age, and you can look at a chart to see exactly where you're at.

I'll give you some examples here in a second, but that's kind of the collective number I want to look at.

Now, to give you a little bit of context of what some of the gold standards are here, a total amount of muscle mass, we can have a little more fun.

I want to take you all the way back to 1995.

There's this classic study that came out, and it basically said, all right, the average gym goer is something like the neighborhood of 21.5 to 22 on an FFMI score.

And they actually theorized at that point that the only way to get past a score of 25 was to be to use exogenous hormones and again, specifically testosterone.

Now, another reminder here, I'm not encouraging or promoting the use of hormones, especially outside of working directly with your doctor, but this is what they're establishing.

What they're trying to identify is what is the genetic limitation of muscle?

In other words, how much muscle can a normal human have

outside of using exogenous hormones.

And the answer they came up with was 24.8 or was sort of roughly 25.