Once upon a time, stepping on a scale and checking your weight was enough. This was the metric we all used for generations to determine if we were “in shape.” As we became more and more health conscious, we turned toward our body mass index, or BMI, for a more precise awareness of where we ought to be. Now that we are a nation of high-tech fitness fanatics (not that there's anything wrong with that), more and more gyms are going beyond BMI and installing full body scanners.

Full body scanners, manufactured by companies mPort and Styku, among others, resemble photo booths. They use a powerful camera to record millions of data points along your waist, chest, and arms in under 30 seconds. The machine them assembles a 3D model that can be rotated, panned, and zoomed. The aim of all this technology is to show you exactly where in your body you are losing weight, and where you are bulking up your muscles.

We know that getting fit is more than just losing weight. It's also about building muscle mass. The same amount of muscle weighs more than fat, in fact, so if we just focus upon our bathroom scale's contribution, we may be getting some fundamentally poor data. If we are building musculature and shedding fat, we can actually be gaining weight, albeit losing volume. And beyond just noting that we are fitting into some old clothes again, how can we measure something like that?

Enter the full body scanner. It provides you not only with your BMI score, but with what are essentially infrared photographs of harder-to-pinpoint factors like your body fat composition and hip-to-waist ratio. If you are at the gym to work on your biceps or abs, the body scanner can give you a day-to-day visual scorecard and record of just how successful you are. The machine also obviates the need for the (frequently embarrassing and awkward) experience of a gym employee taking your measurements during the course of your training.

If your gym doesn't have one yet, just wait a little bit. Stykuintroduced the equipment at trade shows in 2015, and within the following year growth increased by 550 percent. It is now available in 350 locations in 25 countries around the world. It has been introduced most recently in the UK and Korea and will launch at select gyms in Brazil by early 2017.