Saturday, December 20, 2008

Achieve Muscle Weight Gain Quickly with HIIT

By Jared Conley

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 implemented in recent years. While standard cardiovascular training were looked at as the only efficient ways to shed fat, and the only effective workouts for endurance athletes, high intensity interval training (HIIT) has been shown to be advantageous to athletes in all sports, and for people with wildly varying goals.

Standard aerobic activity is referred to as "steady state," which essentially means that you work up to a fixed intensity level and continue working out at that level throughout the workout. During the workout, your body gets half of its fuel by burning fat, and gets the rest through oxygen intake, and by tapping into your glycogen and muscle stores.

Interval sessions, on the other hand, involve short high intensity intervals followed by moderate intensity rest periods. HIIT sessions spare your muscles and are short, but pack a wallop. A 15-minute HIIT session can raise your resting metabolic rate for a full day, enabling you to keep 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 improve your overall fitness level in very short sessions. Better still, if your goals include muscle gain and fat burning, adding HIIT to your weekly workouts is a no-brainer.

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