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At 5 ft 10: Devine says 161 lb, Robinson 157, Miller 155, Hamwi 165 — the formulas span a zone, and the zone is the honest answer.
"Ideal weight" has no single answer — medicine uses four different formulas (Devine, Robinson, Miller, Hamwi), all built from height and sex, all disagreeing by a few pounds. This calculator runs all four plus the BMI healthy band, because the truthful output is a range, not a verdict — and the FAQ explains what none of them can see: muscle, frame, and age.
Anyone setting a goal weight uses it: at 5 ft 10, Devine says 161 lb, Robinson 157, Miller 155 — the four formulas define a zone, not a verdict.
None — they were built for drug dosing (Devine, 1974) and clinical convenience, not body composition, and studies show they span a 5–10% band that all sits within healthy variation. Devine: 50 kg + 2.3 kg per inch over 5 ft (45.5 for women). Robinson nudges lower, Miller lower still, Hamwi higher. The right use: treat the four outputs as a zone — at 5 ft 10 that zone runs roughly 155–165 lb for men. All of them share the fatal blind spot: they see height only, so a muscular 200-lb athlete and a sedentary 200 lb read identically "overweight." That is why clinicians pair these with waist circumference and body-fat percentage before calling anything ideal.
Meaningfully — the classic adjustment is ±10%: small frame subtracts 10% from the formula result, large frame adds it. The wrist test estimates frame: wrap thumb and middle finger around the opposite wrist — overlap means small frame, just touching is medium, a gap is large. At 5 ft 10 male with a 160 lb formula average: small frame ~145 lb, large frame ~175 lb — and both can be perfectly healthy, which is a 30-pound spread the raw formulas never mention. Muscle density compounds it: muscle is ~18% denser than fat, so two people at identical weight and height can wear different sizes. The most honest "ideal weight" combines the formula zone with performance markers — resting heart rate, blood pressure, waist-to-height ratio under 0.5 — rather than the scale alone.
They are the same blindness with different packaging — both reduce you to height and weight. BMI's healthy band (18.5–24.9) at least frames the answer as a range: at 5 ft 10, 129–174 lb. The Devine-class formulas produce a point estimate inside it. Where both fail identically: athletes (BMI called prime Michael Jordan "overweight"), the elderly (muscle loss drops weight while fat rises — "normal weight obesity"), and tall/short extremes where the height-squared scaling distorts. The metrics that add real information: waist-to-height ratio (under 0.5 — the strongest simple predictor of cardiometabolic risk), body-fat percentage (healthy roughly 10–20% men, 18–28% women), and resting blood markers. Use this calculator's zone as the starting hypothesis, then let the waistband and the annual physical arbitrate.