Exercise, Build Muscle Up While Shedding Fat with High Intensity Interval Training

I bet you've heard it repeatedly: you cannot build muscle up and lose fat concurrently. You've been told that gaining mass requires an increase in calories, while fat burning involves a decrease in calories. This conventional wisdom is partially accurate, but the beliefs are being disproven with insights into interval-based workouts. The fact is, you can accomplish muscle weight gain while you burn fat if you add intervals to your sessions.

Interval training isn’t completely new, but it’s more widely understood, accepted, and implemented as of late. While traditional aerobic activities were looked at as the only effective ways to shed pounds, and the only acceptable workouts for endurance athletes, high intensity interval training (HIIT) has proven to be beneficial to athletes of all kinds, and for people with many different goals.

Traditional cardio activity is often referred to as "steady state," meaning that you build up to a predetermined intensity level and maintain that level throughout the workout. During the workout, your body gets half of its fuel through your fat stores, and gets the remainder through your oxygen system, and by dipping into your muscle and glycogen stores.

High-intensity sessions, on the other hand, involve quick maximum intensity intervals followed by lower intensity rest periods. HIIT sessions are muscle sparing and are fast, but pack a wallop. A fifteen-minute HIIT workout can raise your resting metabolic rate for almost 24 hours, enabling you to keep burning higher levels of fat for up to a day.

In addition to this, because your muscles burn calories during every minute of the day, the more muscle you have, the more fat you burn, even while you're sitting still. Because HIIT not only spares your muscle, but also helps you build muscle up, your future fat burning ability is increased.

The bottom line is that regardless of your fitness goals, HIIT sessions can help you improve your overall fitness level with very short sessions. Even better, if your goals include muscle gain and fat shedding, adding HIIT to your workout schedule is a no-brainer.