Body statistics: what the data actually shows

What is the average height by country?

The average adult man measures 175.3 cm (5′9′′) in the United States and 175.3 cm in the United Kingdom, while the average adult woman measures 161.3 cm (5′3.5′′) and 162.3 cm respectively, on CDC NHANES 2015 to 2018 and Health Survey for England figures taken with a stadiometer by someone else rather than collected by asking. That distinction does a lot of work in this subject.

The NCD Risk Factor Collaboration pooled measured heights from more than 18.6 million people in 200 countries, and its estimates put the global gain between people born in 1896 and 1996 at about 9 cm for men and 8 cm for women. Better childhood feeding and a lighter burden of childhood infection do nearly all of that work, which is why height gains track public health spending more closely than they track any national story about genes. Dutch men average 182.5 cm and sit at the top of the table, off the back of a dietary and public health shift that began in the middle of the 20th century.

Rankings move around more than people assume. America was among the tallest countries in the early 20th century and has since been passed by most of Europe, because the US had the smallest gain in height of any high-income country and levelled off earlier than the rest. For where you personally land, the height percentile calculator does the arithmetic, and the full country table with the NCD-RisC figures sits on the average height by country page.

What is the average weight?

The average US adult man weighs 199.8 lbs (90.6 kg) and the average US adult woman weighs 170.8 lbs (77.5 kg), counting everyone aged 20 and over, on CDC NHANES figures read off a clinic scale rather than reported by the person standing on it. Ask instead of weigh and the answer comes back 1 to 5 kg light, which is enough to move a national average.

Six decades have moved that a long way. In the 1960 to 1962 National Health Examination Survey, the forerunner of NHANES, the average American man weighed 166.3 lbs and the average American woman 140.2 lbs, so men have put on roughly 33 lbs since and women roughly 30 lbs. Height barely shifted across the same stretch, which means almost all of the added mass is fat rather than muscle or frame.

Weight also moves within a single life, peaking in the 30s and 40s for men and the 40s for women, then falling again in older adults as muscle goes. So the age band you compare yourself against changes the answer, which is what the weight percentile calculator is for. And if the question underneath is really what you ought to weigh at your height, the healthy weight calculator answers that one instead.

What is a normal body fat percentage?

For US adults aged 20 and over, NHANES DXA scans from 1999 to 2004 put average body fat at 28.1% for men and 40.0% for women, and the figure climbs with age as muscle mass drops away and fat moves toward the centre of the body. DXA measures the tissue directly, which no caliper, tape or bathroom scale manages, so it is the figure worth trusting when two methods disagree about you.

The American Council on Exercise categories are the other half of the picture. Men run 2 to 5% essential fat, 6 to 13% athlete, 14 to 17% fitness, 18 to 24% average, and obese above 25%. Women run 10 to 13% essential, 14 to 20% athlete, 21 to 24% fitness, 25 to 31% average, and obese above 32%. Set the DXA averages against those bands and both the average American man, at 28.1%, and the average woman, at 40.0%, land above ACE's obese line. Fitness culture treats the athlete band as the ordinary one, which is how a benchmark almost nobody reaches, and almost nobody needs, came to feel like the target.

Two methods can put the same person several points apart, so treat any single reading as the middle of a range. The body fat percentage calculator gives you an estimate and the tier it falls in, while the visceral fat calculator deals with the fat around the organs, which is the part that carries the cardiovascular risk.

What are average body proportions?

Arm span and height come out close to equal across the population, with the ape index, arm span divided by height, averaging approximately 1.01 for men and 0.99 for women, which puts the long-armed build that climbers and swimmers talk about in the tail of a normal distribution rather than in a category of its own. No health outcome hangs on the ratio at all.

Waist-to-hip ratio is the one with a clinic behind it. In the CDC's NHANES 2017 to 2018 exam files, which record hip as well as waist, the average US man aged 20 and over comes out at 0.97 and the average woman at 0.90, and the World Health Organization draws its raised risk line at 0.90 for men and 0.85 for women. On those figures 82% of men and 72% of women are at or over the line, which is what several decades of fat moving to the middle of the body looks like once you compress it into one number.

Shoulder-to-waist ratio averages approximately 1.53 for men and 1.36 for women in population samples, and it shifts with age, training and how much fat someone is carrying, so it tells you more about the last two years than about the skeleton underneath. The body proportions calculator takes a tape measure reading and sets all three ratios against those population figures.

How much can the average person bench press?

An untrained man benches approximately 135 lbs (61 kg), rising to 155 to 175 lbs after 6 to 12 months of consistent training, 185 to 225 lbs for an intermediate lifter with 1 to 3 years behind him, and past 225 lbs at advanced level, on NSCA reference data and Strength Level aggregates of millions of user-reported lifts. Two 45 lb plates a side is the only reason 225 became the number everybody quotes.

Women average roughly 50 to 60% of the male figure at the same training level. Untrained sits at 55 to 70 lbs and intermediate at 85 to 115 lbs after consistent work. Upper-body muscle mass, shoulder anatomy and arm length account for the gap, so it says nothing about how hard anyone trains or how fit they are.

Strength Level numbers come from people who bother to log their lifts, a self-selected crowd that pulls the whole distribution upward, so read them as a gym population rather than a national one. Absolute weight also flatters the heavy, which is why a ratio against bodyweight compares two people far better than a plate count. The bench press strength calculator works in both, and sports performance benchmarks covers the other lifts and events.

What is the average running pace?

RunRepeat's State of Running 2019 pooled 107.9 million race results from 1986 to 2018 and put the average marathon finish in 2018 at 4:32:49. It reports averages rather than medians, and a long tail of slow finishers drags any average away from the middle of the pack, so the typical runner finishes a little faster than the mean. Use a median where you can find one, since the mean is describing the tail as much as it describes you.

Half marathons land around 1:55 for men and 2:12 for women on Strava Year in Sport and RunRepeat data, with marathons at approximately 4:22 and 4:45. Pace then falls by roughly 1% a year after 35. A fifty-year-old holding exactly the training volume they held at thirty-five will read slower on the clock while having lost nothing you could call fitness, and most age-graded tables exist to undo that.

Strava feeds and running forums are where most people calibrate, and both skew far faster than the running population as a whole. That is how a 5K under 25 minutes came to feel like the baseline when it sits well above average. The running pace percentile puts your time against the 107 million rather than against the people you follow, and the marathon pace calculator handles splits.

What is the rarest eye colour?

Green is the rarest of the major eye colours at approximately 2% of the world, with hazel and amber near 5% each and grey rarer still, while brown covers 70 to 80% and blue 8 to 10%, on the global estimates that get quoted everywhere, which are stitched together from regional surveys rather than counted worldwide. Brown leads because South Asia, East Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America hold enormous populations in which brown eyes are close to universal. Blue clusters into Northern Europe hard enough to reach 85% in parts of Scandinavia.

Green and hazel both come out of melanin interacting with light scattering inside the iris, which is why they read differently by a window and under a bulb while brown and blue hold steady. Amber, the golden or copper tone, sits at approximately 5% globally. Grey is rarer again and concentrates in Scandinavian and Eastern European populations. None of these categories has a hard edge, and where one study draws the line between hazel and amber another puts it somewhere else.

Rarity is a regional statement and never a global one. Green eyes turn up in over 20% of Irish and Scottish people, so they are unusual worldwide and unremarkable in Galway. Sturm and Larsson (2009) put 74% of the variation in eye colour down to one stretch of chromosome 15 around the OCA2 gene, with other genes sharing the rest, which leaves the brown-dominant, blue-recessive model taught in school somewhere between a simplification and a fiction. The eye colour rarity calculator works the number out for a region rather than for the planet.

How common is hair loss?

Approximately 50% of men have noticeable hair loss by age 50, and it starts earlier than most men expect. In a community sample of US men, Rhodes et al. (1998) found moderate to extensive loss, Norwood type III or above, in 16% of men aged 18 to 29 and 53% of men aged 40 to 49. Past 60, over 90% show some degree of androgenetic alopecia. The 50/50/50 rule people repeat, 50% of men with 50% loss by 50, turns out to fit the population data reasonably well.

Women lose hair on a different pattern altogether. Thinning spreads across the crown while the frontal hairline mostly holds, so female pattern hair loss goes unnoticed for longer and gets mistaken for shedding. Approximately 40% of women have noticeable FPHL by age 50, and the rate climbs after menopause as oestrogen drops away. The Ludwig scale runs from Stage I, a parting that has widened enough to see, to Stage III, near-total crown baldness, which fewer than 1% of women ever reach.

Older prevalence figures come mostly from clinic samples of white men, which is one reason the Rhodes community sample found hair loss more common than earlier work had, and rates differ by ancestry, so read the table as an order of magnitude rather than a precise national count. What the numbers do settle is how ordinary this is at every age, which is the thing nobody believes while it is happening to them. The hair loss calculator puts a stage on it and gives the prevalence for your age, and if the question is how to look after the hair you have, the hair washing quiz gives the interval dermatologists recommend for your hair type.

What is the average reaction time?

A healthy young adult reacts to a simple visual signal in roughly 200 to 250 milliseconds. Jain et al. (2015) timed 120 medical students aged 18 to 20 at an average of 216 ms for a visual signal and 174 ms for a sound, hearing being the shorter route into the brain. Der and Deary (2006) reanalysed 7,130 UK adults from the Health and Lifestyle Survey and found simple reaction time barely slows until about 50, while choice reaction time slows across the whole adult range.

Reaction time tops out in the late teens and early 20s and then only goes one way. For simple reactions the loss through the 30s and 40s is too small to notice, and after 50 the slope steepens. Silverman's 2006 meta-analysis pooled 72 effect sizes from 21 studies and 15,003 people and found men faster on average. Sleep, alcohol and the hour of the day each move a single test enough to matter.

Human Benchmark publishes its own average, which isn't a population figure at all, because the people who go looking for a reflex test online are young, male and mostly gamers. Any web-based test also measures your screen and your mouse alongside your nervous system. The reaction time test times you the same way and then places the result against the academic samples instead of against the internet.

What is the most common body shape?

The rectangle is the most common female body shape at approximately 46%, in Cynthia Istook's North Carolina State University analysis of more than 6,300 women's body scans, released in 2006. Bust, waist and hips sit within a narrow range of one another on a rectangle, giving a straight torso with little waist definition. Against that, the hourglass that everybody assumes is standard covers only 8% of women.

The rest of the NCSU sample breaks into spoon or pear, hips at least two inches wider than the bust, at a little over 20%, and inverted triangle, bust three or more inches wider than the hips, at nearly 14%. What's left falls into the study's smaller groups, the triangle and the top and bottom hourglass. Different studies rank these differently because they draw the boundaries in different places, so a shape you got from one quiz will not always survive another. Fashion and film overrepresent the hourglass by a wide margin, and that is where the assumption comes from rather than from any measurement.

Shape is not a fixed trait either. Hormonal change, menopause above all, redistributes fat and moves plenty of women from pear or hourglass toward rectangle or apple inside a few years. The body shape quiz classifies you on the NCSU definitions, while the Kibbe body type test takes similar measurements somewhere else entirely, into styling.

How has the average body changed over time?

American men went from 173.5 cm (5′8.3′′) in 1960 to 1962 to 175.8 cm (5′9.2′′) by 1988 to 1994, on CDC survey data for men aged 20 to 74, and they've barely moved since. Better childhood nutrition and a lighter burden of infectious disease account for the rise. Most high-income countries hit the same ceiling in the 1980s and 1990s, while parts of East Asia and lower-income countries are still climbing because childhood nutrition there is still improving.

Weight never hit a ceiling. Average male weight went from 166.3 lbs in 1960 to approximately 199.8 lbs in the recent NHANES cycles, roughly 33 lbs across six decades, and female weight from 140.2 lbs to approximately 170.8 lbs. Because the height levelled off around the late 1980s and the weight did not, everything added since has gone onto BMI rather than spreading across a bigger frame.

Average male BMI moved from 25.1 in 1960 to 1962 to 29.4 in 2015 to 2018, from just over the top of the healthy range to a whisker under the obesity line of 30. That drift is the reason the height percentile calculator and the weight percentile calculator both work off age-adjusted reference data. Compare a 25-year-old against a 65-year-old on raw figures and you are really comparing two different decades of childhood.