The UK’s average body measurements

We’ve been busy at Factory Weights, we recently commissioned a survey that asked 1,000 men and 1,000 women to estimate 11 key body measurements. We’re not just mad for stats though, we thought we’d get some insight into how people perceive themselves and others and what they think the average man or woman looks like. What we found was pretty interesting and further reinforced the idea that men know little about realistic body expectations. It was found that men underestimated the average female body by an average of 38%, whilst women underestimated their own bodies by 16%. 

Perhaps most disappointing was their judgement of the average female weight, which they pinned at 61kg – a whole 13% under the true average of 70kg. In fact, men underestimated every single measurement apart from 2 – height and chest size. Sounds about right! Here are the figures.

All 2,000 responses were used to generate average 3d models to see how they compared to reality. As you can see from the graphics, a picture paints a thousand words when it comes to the expectations of men vs women.

It isn’t just women that men seem to hold a high standard for, though, as they were way off the mark when judging their own bodies too. Their idea of a modern man would need an average increase of 9% across their muscles whilst reducing their waist and hips by 25%:

Despite still finding themselves 15% off the mark on average, the women were much kinder to men – their expectation of 180cm height is only half the growth spurt needed compared to the men’s answer, whilst an underestimation of 17% for the waist was balanced out by perfect answers for biceps, hips, and thighs.

 We got our Olympic ambassador, Taekwondo Olympics Medal winner Sarah Stevenson to have a look and she had this to say.

“It’s interesting to see that women have more achievable ideas for both their own and the men’s bodies. Historically, women have always been under immense pressure when it comes to their bodies and so it’s amazing to see that their own perception of what the modern woman's body looks like is far closer to the real thing than it is to the size zero images forced down our throats in years gone by. That said, it’s clear that men’s perceptions are heading in the wrong direction. Hopefully, this can be a bit of a wake-up call!”

We couldn’t agree more!