tell me please which body scale is best overall
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Are you wanting accurate weight measurements or accurate body composition?
Any decent scale does fine weight wise, I have a garmin one that uploads the metrics to intervals and trainingpeaks.
for body composition I am unaware of any home scale that is accurate. I think they work well enough* for trends but you should probably do a dexa scan periodically if you want to accurately track body composition.
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I’m assuming that you want a scale that measures body composition and connects to a smartphone. Otherwise any cheap digital or analog scale will do.
Three good choices are Whithings’ line-up of scales, Garmin’s scale and Tanita’s range of smart scales. You can see Tanita scales in e. g. gyms and such. We have a Whithings scale at home, and it works well. We bought it in Japan so for some weird reason it only measures ± 200 g even though everywhere else it offers ±100 g.
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Forum 101, make the title have something to do with your question.
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Yup proper advice. I edited it for clarity.
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I always liked the old-fashioned double beam balance like docs used to have. That’s what I had and used for many years. IMO, more reliable than the spring type mechanical and who knows what’s going on inside the digital ones. You’re on your own in getting the data into your apps. Health o Meter 402KL Physician Beam Scale | Vitality Medical
I’ve had a tanita for years, it got wonky and wouldn’t lock in on a weight plus I wanted auto uploading so I got a Garmin in Feb of this year
Day 1 the Garmin read about 4-5% higher for body fat. .as in 20 vs 24% not 20.8% I figured out the Garmin uses your activity level for it so I adjusted that and it went up to something like 6-7% more the next day. I didn’t really care at the time I wasn’t training much, was at a recent high weight figured the Garmin was closer.
Recently though having dropped 20lbs and looking in the mirror I was starting to disagree with the Garmin reading. I broke out the tanita a few days ago ( having tried a few times since it actually worked this time) and it read 20.8 while the Garmin says 27.1% just a few minutes before. I’m not saying the tanita is correct but based on the mirror it is way closer.
Years ago TR podcast crew did dexa scans and also tested on a tanita and they were very close when not using athlete mode, which is why I got one.
The Garmin can be calibrated to whatever you want, probably should be a dexa or hydro but technically a pinc/caliper test could work. I love that auto uploading especially right now on a heavy weight cut. When I get down to goal weight in a month or so I’ll probably book a dexa to calibrate it against, don’t want to mess up my spreadsheet…
Another hiccup of the Garmin is the profiles. We had a house guest who was apparently close enough to my weight using it from time to time and I kept getting double weights stored and I was very confused. Finally during my cut they had a heavier weigh in and I had a big drop so it made their last weigh in more than 10lbs from my new weigh in and it absolutely would not recognize me. I had to delete and reset everything. Which was infuriating because another time my 30lbs toddler was playing with it and it stored her as me 200lbs drop ok but not 11…
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the only reason to buy a garmin scale is if you are invested in the garmin training ecosystem with their watches and bike computers - the index scale is the only straightforward way to get weigh-ins into garmin connect.
otherwise, they are rubbish scales. the body composition seems to be based on BMI mapped to population averages. you can set a known body fat % for it to base off but even then, as far as i can tell it only adjusts based on weight changes, there is no significant ability to differentiate between fat, muscle and water. they also adjust for age which clearly has no direct relationship to body composition - they just guess that if you’re older then you’re probably higher fat, lower muscle.
the wifi uploads are mostly reliable but not great which is actually pretty bad for this day and age.
i had an old fitbit scale that seemed to be better for both body composition and upload reliability.
withings seem to be regarded as the best all round if you are platform agnostic
Have you not considered some of the options mentioned upthread?
The second post they now deleted was actually from an additional thread they started that got merged into here. But I now see this was the OP of this thread as well so 2 scale posts right after joining likely means spam incoming.
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I am almost positive it was a bot lol.
I am definitely all in on the Garmin ecosystem, watch, scale, BPM, HRM, head unit, varia lights, etc. So take this with all that bias built in, but if you really care about the accuracy of the data beyond weight the Garmin S2 after calibrating with Dexafit data has been super accurate for me. It’s not dead on with my Dexafit every time but stays very close for Body Fat % and Skeletal Muscle Mass as long as you follow the same protocol for when you use it consistently which are the two things I really care about tracking. I think results vary for people based on if you set your activity class correctly and set your body composition correctly using Dexafit data and I have read that your age may impact data in some way? But for me it has been great after not really loving the S1 scale that I never felt was very accurate on the BF% but that one didn’t allow you to calibrate with body composition data.