Achieve Muscle Weight Gain Quickly with HIIT
I bet you’ve heard it repeatedly: you can’t build muscle up and burn fat at the same time. They say that building mass involves an increase in calories, while fat burning involves a decrease in calories. This old school wisdom is based partially in fact, but the concepts are being tossed on their ears with insights into interval-based workouts. The fact is, you can accomplish muscle weight gain at the same time as you burn fat if you add intervals to your workouts.
Interval training isn’t new, but it’s more widely understood, accepted, and practiced in recent years. While traditional cardiovascular activities were considered the only efficient ways to shed weight, and the only acceptable workouts for endurance athletes, high intensity interval training (HIIT) has been shown to be advantageous to athletes in all fields, and for folks with varying goals.
Standard cardio activity is often referred to as “steady state,” which essentially means that you work up to a certain intensity level and maintain that level throughout the training session. During the training session, your body gets 50 percent of its energy through your fat stores, and gets the remainder through your oxygen system, and by dipping into your glycogen and muscle deposits.
Interval sessions, conversely, consist of short maximum intensity intervals followed by lower intensity rest periods. HIIT sessions are muscle sparing and are quick, but pack a wallop. A fifteen-minute HIIT session can raise your base metabolism for almost 24 hours, 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 sleeping. 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 workouts can help you increase your overall fitness level with very short sessions. Better still, if your goals include muscle building and fat shedding, adding HIIT to your workout schedule is a no-brainer.
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