Build Muscle Up While Burning Fat with Interval Training

You've heard it repeatedly: it's impossible to build muscle up and lose 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 truth is, you can accomplish muscle weight gain while you burn fat if you add intervals to your workouts.

Interval training isn’t entirely new, but it’s more widely understood, accepted, and implemented in recent years. Whereas standard cardiovascular activities were looked at as the only efficient ways to shed fat, and the only acceptable workouts for endurance athletes, high intensity interval training (HIIT) has been shown to be beneficial to athletes in all fields, and for folks with wildly varying goals.

Old school aerobic activity is referred to as "steady state," meaning that you work up to a certain intensity level and maintain that level for the duration of the workout. During the session, your body gains half of its fuel through your fat stores, and gets the remainder through your oxygen system, and by cutting into your glycogen and muscle deposits.

Interval sessions, conversely, consist of short maximum intensity intervals followed by moderate intensity rest periods. HIIT sessions spare your muscles 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 continue burning higher levels of fat for up to a day.

In addition to this, because your muscles burn 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 increase your overall level of fitness in very short sessions. But even better, if your goals include muscle building and fat loss, adding HIIT to your workout schedule is a no-brainer.