What is body composition?
Your body is made up of multiple components — skeletal muscle, fat, bone, water and organs. Body composition refers to the proportion of each of these components relative to your total body weight. Two people can weigh exactly the same but have radically different body compositions — one might be predominantly lean muscle, the other predominantly fat. The scales give you identical readings. Their health, fitness and risk profiles are completely different.
This is why body weight alone is such a poor metric. It doesn't tell you whether you're gaining muscle, losing fat, retaining water, or all three simultaneously. Without composition data, you're essentially flying blind.
What does an InBody scan measure?
The InBody 770 at Team Breakthrough uses bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) to measure your body composition with clinical-grade accuracy. A low-level electrical current is passed through the body at multiple frequencies, and the resistance of different tissues to that current provides precise data on body composition. The full scan takes less than two minutes and gives you:
- Skeletal muscle mass — total and segmental (each arm, each leg, torso separately)
- Body fat mass and percentage
- Visceral fat level — the metabolically active fat stored around your organs, which is a key indicator of cardiovascular and metabolic health risk
- Total body water — broken down into intracellular and extracellular fluid
- Basal metabolic rate (BMR) — how many calories your body burns at rest
- Segmental muscle balance — identifying asymmetries between left and right sides that may indicate injury risk
- Phase angle — a marker of cellular health and integrity
Why is this information so valuable?
With accurate body composition data, your training and nutrition decisions become genuinely evidence-based rather than guesswork. If you've been training consistently but your weight hasn't changed, an InBody scan might reveal that you've gained 2kg of muscle and lost 2kg of fat simultaneously — exactly the right direction of travel that the scales make invisible.
If you're losing weight but a large proportion of that loss is muscle rather than fat — a common problem with restrictive diets and excessive cardio — an InBody scan will catch that early before it negatively impacts your metabolism and long-term results.
Visceral fat in particular is something most people are unaware of. You can be a relatively normal body weight and still carry dangerous levels of visceral fat. Knowing your visceral fat level is one of the most important single pieces of information for assessing your cardiovascular and metabolic health risk.
Tracking progress over time
A single InBody scan is informative. A series of scans over time is transformative. By scanning every 4–8 weeks, you can track exactly how your body is responding to training and nutrition changes. This allows your coach to make precise adjustments rather than relying on subjective feedback. Did that change in training volume add muscle? Did adjusting your protein intake shift the composition needle? The data tells you.
At Team Breakthrough, InBody scanning is included with all gym memberships. We use the results as a starting point for building your programme and as an ongoing tool to track and adjust your progress.
Who should get an InBody scan?
Everyone who trains seriously should have a baseline scan. But it's particularly valuable for people who feel like they're doing everything right but not seeing the results they expect, anyone managing their weight or body composition for health or performance reasons, and people recovering from injury or illness where muscle loss may have occurred without being visible on the scales.
InBody scanning near Bath
Team Breakthrough in Box, near Bath, has a clinical-grade InBody 770 scanner available to all members and for one-off bookings. Your results are reviewed with a coach who can translate the data into concrete, actionable changes to your training and nutrition. If you're serious about results, this is where to start.