“Body check” has several distinct meanings depending on the context. In ice hockey, it’s a legal defensive move. In mental health, it refers to a compulsive habit of scrutinizing your own body for perceived flaws. And in medicine or fitness, it can simply mean a physical assessment. Here’s what each one involves and why the differences matter.
Body Checking in Ice Hockey
In hockey, a body check is intentional physical contact made by a skater against an opponent who controls the puck. The goal is to separate the opponent from the puck, not to punish or intimidate. USA Hockey’s official rules require that a legal body check come from the front, diagonally from the front, or straight from the side. It must be delivered using only the trunk of the body (hips and shoulders), and contact must land above the opponent’s knees and at or below the shoulders. Using hands, forearms, elbows, or a stick to deliver a check is illegal.
Any check targeting the head or neck, or delivered against a vulnerable player with excessive force, draws a penalty. Related infractions include boarding (driving a player violently into the boards) and charging (skating an excessive distance before making contact).
Body Checking and Youth Injury Rates
Body checking is one of the leading sources of injury in youth hockey. A study across two Canadian provinces tracked 13- to 14-year-old non-elite players before and after a policy change that banned body checking. When checking was allowed, the injury rate in games was about 8 per 1,000 player-hours. After checking was removed, that rate dropped to roughly 3.7 per 1,000 hours, a 56% reduction. Concussion rates also trended lower, though the decrease wasn’t statistically significant in that study. These findings are a major reason several youth leagues now delay full-contact checking until older age groups.
Body Checking as a Mental Health Behavior
Outside of sports, “body checking” describes a repetitive, often compulsive habit of monitoring your body’s shape, size, or weight. It’s closely linked to eating disorders, particularly anorexia nervosa and bulimia, but it also shows up in people with body image distress who don’t meet the criteria for a formal diagnosis.
Common body checking behaviors include:
- Weighing yourself multiple times a day
- Pinching skin on your stomach, thighs, or arms to gauge fat
- Checking whether your thighs touch when you stand or sit
- Feeling for bones and joints to see if they’re prominent enough
- Repeatedly looking in mirrors or reflective surfaces, focusing on specific body parts
- Trying on “benchmark” clothes to see how tightly or loosely they fit
Cognitive behavioral models of eating disorders describe body checking as a way of seeking reassurance about your appearance. Ironically, it does the opposite. The act of checking draws your attention to perceived flaws rather than providing comfort, which reinforces the urge to check again.
How Body Checking Affects How You Feel
Experimental research confirms that more frequent body checking makes body dissatisfaction worse in the short term. In one study, participants assigned to a high body checking condition experienced immediate increases in body dissatisfaction, feelings of fatness, and the intensity of self-critical thoughts compared to a low checking group. The low checking group actually saw a decrease in feelings of fatness.
The spike in distress was real but temporary. Within about 30 minutes, most measures returned to baseline. In fact, dissatisfaction scores in the high checking group actually dipped slightly below their starting point after the half-hour mark. This short cycle of distress, brief relief, and return to baseline is what makes the behavior so self-reinforcing. It mirrors the pattern seen in other compulsive behaviors: the checking temporarily scratches an itch, the itch returns, and the person checks again.
How Body Checking Is Treated
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is the most studied approach for reducing compulsive body checking. Treatment typically targets the behavior from two angles. First, ritual prevention strategies help you gradually stop or reduce checking behaviors, similar to the approach used for OCD. You might be asked to limit mirror use, remove the scale from your bathroom, or delay the urge to check by a set number of minutes that increases over time.
Second, cognitive restructuring helps you identify and reframe the thoughts that drive the checking. If checking your stomach is fueled by the thought “I need to make sure I haven’t gained weight,” therapy works on examining that thought’s accuracy and loosening its grip. Research suggests that learning to change how you relate to distressing thoughts, through acceptance and cognitive reappraisal, predicts better body image outcomes than behavioral changes alone. In other words, the shift in thinking matters at least as much as stopping the behavior itself.
Body Checks in Fitness and Medicine
In a fitness or clinical setting, a “body check” usually refers to a standardized physical assessment. This can range from a general health screening (blood pressure, heart rate, basic bloodwork) to more specific body composition measurements.
For body composition, fitness professionals commonly measure skinfold thickness at four standard sites: the front of the thigh, the back of the upper arm (triceps), just below the shoulder blade, and above the hip bone. Using calipers at these points estimates your body fat percentage. Girth measurements at the upper arm, waist, hips, and mid-thigh are also standard and help track changes over time without requiring specialized equipment.
A “body check” can also refer to a skin self-examination. Dermatologists recommend checking your skin at least once a month using the ABCDE criteria: asymmetry in a mole’s shape, irregular borders, uneven color, a diameter larger than 6 millimeters (roughly the size of a pencil eraser), and any evolution or change over time. Any lesion that hits one or more of these markers is worth having a professional evaluate.