So, today I bought a body fat caliper. Nice little thing.
As soon as I got home, I started measuring, and then entered it all into the different calculators on this page:
http://www.linear-software.com/online.html
The strange thing is that the percentage came out A LOT lower than I had expected, and lower than I feel is reasonable. But maybe it's correct, I don't know...?
These are my skin fold thicknesses (all in mm):
Chest: 6
Abdominal: 16
Thigh: 11
Bicep: 6
Tricep: 4
Subscapular: 9 (estimated based on finger pinch, but not far wrong - within 2-3 mm)
Suprailiac: 10
Midaxillary: 8
Lower back: 11
Calf: 6
(They're all "averaged" from 2-4 measurements per site.)
Age: 28
Height: 179 cm
Weight: 66 kg
Neck: 35 cm
Abdomen: 81.5 cm
With all this data, you will be able to fill out all the fields on the page, and calculate.
The first three come out between 9 and 10 %.
The Parillo method gives a whopping 32 %, which is clearly very wrong.
The Durning/Womersley gives just over 12 %.
Finally, the tape measurement method says 16 %.
Of the six, the tape measurement method is closest to what I expected, but perhaps I'm not as fat as I thought? I don't know what to think...
What do you all think? Caliper is often claimed to be the most accurate method for home use, and I can definitely say that my skin fold measurements are good enough.