Dr. Andy Galpin

Higher is better.

I actually personally prefer people to be in the 95th percentile or more, but I'm going to walk you through what this kind of looks like across the 25th, 50th, 70th, and then potentially up to 95th percentile.

For men to be in the 25th percentile, your FFMI score would be about 17.9, and women, that would be 15.1.

Now, notice how as you go from the 25th to 50th percentile, again, representing right in the statistical average or right in the middle.

You've gone from, for men, 17.9 up to 19.1 or so.

And for women, you've gone from 15.1 up to 15.9 or almost 16.

And so these numbers are not going to be huge in terms of what it looks like on paper, but that it does represent a large change in the total amount of muscle mass you have.

If you were to go from that 50th percentile to 75th, you've now gone up to 20.4 for men and 16.8 for women.

As I said, I actually prefer people to be in the 95th percentile or higher because it provides no disadvantage whatsoever in overall health and performance.

That's going to look like something like north of 22 for men and north of 18.1 for women.

Of course, if you're extremely ambiguous and you want to challenge Ray Williams and his record of 41, by all means be my guest and please report back to me if you've accomplished such a feat.

FFMI is not an intuitive number or score.

So if I were to give you an FFMI score that puts you in the 75th percentile, you wouldn't really know what that means.

So let me explain to you how that number is calculated and run you through a couple of samples, and I'll do it both in the empirical as well as in the metric units.

Now, we know science works in kilos, so we will start there.

Globally, when we think about body composition, we're thinking about how much muscle do I have versus how much fat.

But as I said, it's actually a little more complicated than that.

So if you were to get something like a DEXA scan done or even stepped on a scale and that gave you your body fat percentage, what it's telling you is what percentage of your overall body weight is fat versus what is lean body mass.

And remember that lean mass is not just skeletal muscle.

It is skeletal muscle plus bone and water and things like that.