Ideal Body Weight Calculator
“Ideal weight” formulas were built for clinical drug dosing, not for aesthetics or athletic performance. They are shown here with that caveat, and with how much they disagree.
Your results
These formulas ignore muscle mass, frame size and body composition entirely, and originated as clinical dosing tools. A healthy weight range is wide, and a single target number is rarely useful.
Where these formulas came from
All four are functions of height alone, built from a base weight at five feet plus a fixed amount per inch above it. Devine (1974) was created for calculating drug doses; Robinson, Miller and Hamwi are variations on the same idea.
They contain no information about your frame, your muscle mass or your body composition. Two people of identical height get identical answers regardless of whether one is a sedentary office worker and the other a competitive rower.
What to use instead
The healthy BMI range shown above is wider and more honest — for most heights it spans 15–20 kg, which is a more realistic representation of what is healthy.
Better still, work from what you want to be able to do and how you want to look, and track waist circumference and your lifts rather than aiming at a number derived from your height in 1974.
Common questions
Which ideal weight formula is best?
None of them, for athletic purposes. They are clinical dosing tools. The healthy BMI range is a better reference.
Why do the four formulas disagree?
They use different base weights and different increments per inch. The spread shows how arbitrary a single 'ideal' figure is.
I am muscular and above all of these. Is that a problem?
Not in itself. These formulas cannot account for muscle. Check waist-to-height ratio instead.
Should I aim for my ideal weight?
Aim for a healthy waist measurement, good lifts and a weight you can maintain. Those are more useful targets.
Related calculators
Track the numbers, not just calculate them
MyFitsy stores your weight, measurements and every session, so the figures above become a trend instead of a one-off.
