Build Muscle Up While Burning Fat with HIIT

I bet you've heard it a hundred times: you cannot build muscle up and burn fat concurrently. You've been told that building mass involves an increase in calories, while fat burning requires a decrease in calories. This conventional wisdom is based in fact, but the beliefs are being tossed on their ears with insights into interval training. The truth is, you can achieve muscle weight gain at the same time as you burn fat provided that you add interval training to your sessions.

Interval training isn’t completely new, but it’s more widely understood, accepted, and practiced in recent years. While standard aerobic activities were considered the only efficient ways to shed fat, and the only acceptable workouts for endurance athletes, high intensity interval training (HIIT) has proven to be beneficial to athletes in all fields, and for people with wildly varying goals.

Standard aerobic activity is often referred to as "steady state," meaning that you work up to a certain intensity level and continue working out at that level throughout the workout. During the session, your body gains half of its fuel through your fat stores, and gets the remainder through oxygen intake, and by cutting into your glycogen and muscle deposits.

HIIT sessions, on the other hand, involve short maximum intensity intervals followed by moderate intensity rest periods. HIIT sessions spare your muscles and are fast, but pack a wallop. A fifteen-minute HIIT session can raise your base metabolism for almost day, enabling you to continue burning higher levels of fat for up to a day.

On top of this, because your muscles consume calories during every minute of the day, the more lean mass 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 capacity is increased.

The bottom line is that regardless of your fitness goals, HIIT sessions can help you increase your overall level of fitness with very short sessions. Better still, if your goals include mass building and fat shedding, adding HIIT to your weekly workouts is a no-brainer.