Build Muscle Up While Burning Fat with Interval Training

Written By Chouhab on jeudi 4 décembre 2008 | 20:06

By Jared Conley

You've been told a hundred times: you can't build muscle up and lose fat concurrently. They say that building mass involves an increase in calories, while fat burning requires a decrease in calories. This conventional wisdom is partially accurate, but the concepts are being tossed on their ears with insights into interval-based workouts. The truth is, you can achieve muscle weight gain while you burn fat provided that you add intervals to your sessions.

Interval training isn't completely new, but it's more widely understood, accepted, and used these days. While traditional aerobic training were looked at as the only efficient ways to burn fat, and the only effective workouts for endurance athletes, high intensity interval training (HIIT) has been shown to be advantageous to athletes of all types, and for people with all types of goals.

Traditional cardio activity is referred to as "steady state," which means that you build up to a fixed intensity level and continue working out at that level for the duration of the training session. During the session, your body gains half of its energy through your fat stores, and gets the remainder through oxygen intake, and by cutting into your muscle and glycogen 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 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.

About the Author:

0 commentaires: