These notes are intended to clarify and provide additional information on body composition assessment. The term body composition refers to the division of total body weight into lean tissue weight versus fatty tissue weight. Fatty tissue is specific to the amount of fat contained in adipose tissue throughout the body. Subcutaneous fat is the fat contained in adipose tissue found between the skin and skeletal muscle. It is the fat that can be pinched at every part of the body.
Internal fat is the fat contained in adipose tissue on the inside of the body.
It s the fatty tissue that surrounds all of the internal organs of the body. Lean tissue refers all other tissues of the body other than fatty tissue. Those tissues include hair, skin, organs, muscle, bone, etc. In other words, it is anything not considered to be fatty tissue. The importance of body composition is not so much in determining a person s exact percentage of body fat or amount of lean body tissue.