Build Muscle Up While Burning Fat with HIIT
You’ve been told a hundred times: it’s impossible to build muscle up and melt fat concurrently. You’ve been told 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 beliefs are being tossed on their ears with research into interval training. The truth is, you can achieve muscle weight gain at the same time as you burn fat if you add interval training to your sessions.
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 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.
HIIT sessions, conversely, consist of short high intensity intervals followed by moderate intensity recovery periods. HIIT sessions spare your muscles and are quick, but are killer. A fifteen-minute HIIT workout can raise your resting metabolic rate for a full 24 hours, enabling you to continue burning higher levels of fat for up to a day.
In addition to 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 doing nothing. 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.
