Exercise, Build Muscle Up While Shedding Fat with HIIT

I bet you've been told over and over again: you can't build muscle up and lose fat at the same time. They say that building muscle involves an increase in calories, while fat burning involves a decrease in calories. This conventional wisdom is based in fact, but the concepts are being tossed on their ears with insights into interval-based workouts. The fact is, you can achieve muscle weight gain at the same time as you burn fat provided that you add interval training to your workouts.

Interval training isn’t completely new, but it’s more widely understood, accepted, and used as of late. Whereas traditional cardio training were considered 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 beneficial to athletes in all sports, and for people with many different goals.

Old school aerobic activity is often referred to as "steady state," which means that you work up to a fixed intensity level and maintain that level throughout the workout. During the training session, your body pulls half of its energy through your fat stores, and gets the rest through your oxygen system, and by tapping into your glycogen and muscle stores.

HIIT sessions, conversely, involve brief maximum intensity intervals followed by moderate intensity rest periods. HIIT sessions are muscle sparing and are short, but pack a wallop. A fifteen-minute HIIT workout can raise your base metabolism for almost 24 hours, enabling you to keep burning higher levels of fat for up to a day.

On top of 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 in very short sessions. But even better, if your goals include mass building and fat shedding, adding HIIT to your workout schedule is a no-brainer.