Saturday, December 13, 2008

Build Muscle and Burn Fat with HIIT

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 new, but it's more widely understood, accepted, and implemented in recent years. While standard cardiovascular training were looked at as 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 advantageous to athletes in all sports, and for people with wildly varying goals.

Standard cardio activity is often referred to as "steady state," which essentially means that you work up to a certain intensity level and maintain that level throughout the training session. During the training session, your body gets 50 percent of its energy through your fat stores, and gets the remainder through your oxygen system, and by dipping into your glycogen and muscle deposits.

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. - 15995

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