Exercise, Build Muscle Up While Burning Fat with High Intensity Interval Training

You’ve heard it time and time again: it’s not possible to build muscle up and melt fat at the same time. They say that gaining mass requires an increase in calories, while fat burning requires a decrease in calories. This old school wisdom is based partially in fact, but the beliefs are being shaken up with insights into interval workouts. The fact 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 practiced these days. While standard aerobic activities were looked at as the only efficient ways to shed pounds, and the only acceptable workouts for endurance athletes, high intensity interval training (HIIT) has proven to be advantageous to athletes in all fields, and for folks with varying goals.

Traditional aerobic activity is often referred to as “steady state,” meaning that you build up to a certain intensity level and continue working out at that level throughout the session. During the workout, your body gains 50 percent of its energy by burning fat, and gets the remainder through your oxygen system, and by tapping into your muscle and glycogen stores.

HIIT sessions, conversely, involve quick high intensity intervals followed by lower intensity rest periods. HIIT sessions spare your muscles and are quick, but are killer. A 15-minute HIIT workout can raise your metabolic rate 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 inactive. Because HIIT not only spares your muscle, but also helps you build muscle, your future fat burning ability is increased, which makes it a great addition to your muscle workouts.

The bottom line is that regardless of your fitness goals, HIIT workouts can help you increase your overall fitness level in very short sessions. Better still, if your goals include mass building and fat loss, adding HIIT to your workout schedule is a no-brainer.