There’s a decent portion of the US military who I’ve seen fail height/weight standards from powerlifting themselves into being too muscley.
If your weight is too high compared to your height (BMI), they flag you. Then they wrap a tape measure around your neck, and your waist, and if your core is too thick comparatively, you get forced to cut weight. I’ve seen soldiers fight back, and successfully convince their command team to waive their “weight problem” by going out of their way to get BodPodded and proving they are as low as 12% body fat.
I don’t know how much of an outlier the military population is statistically compared to the general US population, but by CDC standards these individuals count as “overweight” despite being incredibly in shape. I have zero faith and trust in the CDC’s use of BMI to generalize a population’s health level.
I would guess the military is a large outlier compared to the general population considering all of the physical training soldiers are required to do. People don’t just accidentally gain a bunch of muscle, it takes a lot of hard work.
Skewed anecdote:
There’s a decent portion of the US military who I’ve seen fail height/weight standards from powerlifting themselves into being too muscley.
If your weight is too high compared to your height (BMI), they flag you. Then they wrap a tape measure around your neck, and your waist, and if your core is too thick comparatively, you get forced to cut weight. I’ve seen soldiers fight back, and successfully convince their command team to waive their “weight problem” by going out of their way to get BodPodded and proving they are as low as 12% body fat.
I don’t know how much of an outlier the military population is statistically compared to the general US population, but by CDC standards these individuals count as “overweight” despite being incredibly in shape. I have zero faith and trust in the CDC’s use of BMI to generalize a population’s health level.
I would guess the military is a large outlier compared to the general population considering all of the physical training soldiers are required to do. People don’t just accidentally gain a bunch of muscle, it takes a lot of hard work.
As stated, BMI is an indicator and not a diagnostic.