You’ve been told over and over again: it’s impossible to build muscle up and lose fat at the same time. They say that building mass involves an increase in calories, while fat burning requires a decrease in calories. This old school wisdom is based partially in fact, but the concepts are being disproven with insights into interval workouts. The truth is, you can accomplish muscle weight gain at the same time as you burn fat if you add interval training to your workouts.
Interval training isn’t new, but it’s more widely understood, accepted, and used these days. While traditional cardiovascular training were looked at as the only reliable ways to burn fat, 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 varying goals.
Traditional cardio 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 session. During the workout, your body pulls half of its fuel through your fat stores, and gets the remainder through oxygen intake, and by cutting into your glycogen and muscle stores.
HIIT sessions, conversely, involve short high intensity intervals followed by moderate intensity recovery periods. HIIT sessions are muscle sparing and are quick, but are killer. A 15-minute HIIT workout can raise your 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 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 sessions can help you improve your overall level of fitness in very short sessions. Better still, if your goals include muscle gain and fat loss, adding HIIT to your weekly workouts is a no-brainer.
