I bet you’ve been told over and over again: you can’t build muscle up and melt fat concurrently. You’ve been told that building mass involves an increase in calories, while fat burning involves a decrease in calories. This conventional wisdom is partially accurate, but the beliefs are being tossed on their ears with research into interval workouts. The truth is, you can accomplish muscle weight gain while you burn fat provided that you add intervals to your workouts.
Interval training isn’t new, but it’s more widely understood, accepted, and implemented these days. While standard aerobic activities were considered the only efficient ways to shed pounds, and the only effective workouts for endurance athletes, high intensity interval training (HIIT) has been shown to be advantageous to athletes of all kinds, and for folks with varying goals.
Old school cardio activity is often referred to as “steady state,” which essentially means that you work up to a fixed intensity level and maintain that level throughout the session. During the training session, your body gets half of its energy by burning fat, and gets the rest through oxygen intake, and by dipping into your glycogen and muscle deposits.
High-intensity sessions, on the other hand, involve quick maximum intensity intervals followed by lower intensity recovery periods. HIIT sessions are muscle sparing and are fast, but pack a wallop. A fifteen-minute HIIT session can raise your resting metabolic rate for a full 24 hours, enabling you to keep 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 muscle 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 capacity 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. Even better, if your goals include mass building and fat shedding, adding HIIT to your weekly workouts is a no-brainer.
