Achieve Muscle Weight Gain Quickly with Interval Training
I bet you’ve heard it repeatedly: you cannot build muscle up and melt fat concurrently. They say that building mass involves an increase in calories, while fat burning involves a decrease in calories. This old school wisdom is based partially in fact, but the concepts are being tossed on their ears with insights into interval workouts. The fact is, you can accomplish muscle weight gain while you burn fat provided that you add interval training to your sessions.
Interval training isn’t completely new, but it’s more widely understood, accepted, and practiced in recent years. While traditional cardio activities were considered the only effective ways to shed pounds, and the only effective workouts for endurance athletes, high intensity interval training (HIIT) has proven to be beneficial to athletes of all kinds, and for folks with all types of goals.
Standard aerobic activity is often 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 pulls half of its energy through your fat stores, and gets the remainder through oxygen intake, and by dipping into your glycogen and muscle deposits.
High-intensity sessions, conversely, involve short high intensity intervals followed by lower intensity recovery periods. HIIT sessions spare your muscles and are short, but are killer. A fifteen-minute HIIT session 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 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, 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 improve your overall level of fitness in very short sessions. Better still, if your goals include mass gain and fat loss, adding HIIT to your workout schedule is a no-brainer.
Tags: body build muscle, build muscle up, exercise build muscle, muscle weight gain
