Ideal Weight for Men — Healthy Ranges by Height and Age

Men’s healthy-weight charts get complicated by one thing more than women’s: muscle mass varies more widely between individual men, so the same height can carry a genuinely healthy weight across a wider span than a single number suggests. Here’s what a healthy range looks like, and why formulas built specifically for clinical use don’t always match what “looks” healthy.

The Standard Healthy Range

Health organisations define a healthy weight range using BMI — 18.5 to 24.9 kg/m² — for adult men and women alike. At common male heights, that range works out to approximately:

Why Muscular Men Often Sit Above Their BMI Range

BMI can’t distinguish muscle from fat, and men on average carry more skeletal muscle mass than women at a similar body fat percentage. A man who trains with weights regularly can easily land in the “overweight” BMI category while carrying a low, healthy body fat percentage — this is one of BMI’s most consistently cited limitations, and we cover it in more depth in our BMI limitations guide.

Sex-Specific Ideal Body Weight Formulas

Separately from the BMI range, clinical formulas like Devine (1974) estimate a single ideal weight figure for men: 50 kg plus 2.3 kg for every inch over 5 feet in height. For a man at 5’10” (70 inches), that works out to roughly 50 + (2.3 × 10) = 73 kg (about 161 lb). These formulas were built for medical dosing calculations, not as personal targets — we compare all four major formulas side by side, with the exact equations, in our ideal body weight formulas guide.

Waist Size Often Matters More Than Weight

For men specifically, waist circumference and waist-to-hip ratio are frequently better indicators of cardiometabolic risk than weight or BMI alone, because men are more prone to carrying fat viscerally (around the abdominal organs) rather than subcutaneously. We cover the exact WHO risk thresholds in our waist-to-hip ratio guide.