somatotyperne

The somatotyperne, known in English as somatotypes, are a framework for describing human body shape and proportions. They originated with William Sheldon in the mid-20th century, who linked physique to general traits, though the personality aspect is now viewed skeptically. The more widely used approach today was developed by Heath and Carter and describes bodies in terms of three components.

The three components are endomorphy (fatness and roundness), mesomorphy (muscularity and bone width), and ectomorphy (linearity and slenderness). Each component is scored on a 1–7 scale, and an individual's somatotype is reported as a three-number rating (for example, 2–5–3). People can be described as predominantly endomorph, mesomorph, or ectomorph, or as a balance of types.

Applications include fitness and training planning, bodybuilding, and some areas of physical anthropology to describe population variation. The framework can help anticipate how a person’s body may respond to different training or diet strategies, though it does not determine performance or health outcomes.

Criticism focuses on reliability and validity concerns: measurement error, subjective judgments, and the fact that a person’s physique can change with age, training, and environment. The original personality associations are not supported by evidence, and somatotypes are now typically used as descriptive tendencies rather than fixed categories.

Today somatotypes are largely a historical tool and are often supplemented or replaced by measures of body composition, size, and functional performance. They remain a simple, if limited, language for describing human body diversity.