Muscle Workouts with HIIT

I bet you've been told time and time again: it's impossible to build muscle and lose fat at the same time. They say that building mass requires 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 insights into interval workouts. The truth is, you can accomplish muscle weight gain at the same time as you burn fat if you add intervals to your muscle workouts.

Interval training isn’t entirely new, but it’s more widely understood, accepted, and implemented as of late. While standard cardio training were considered the only efficient ways to shed weight, and the only acceptable workouts for endurance athletes, high intensity interval training (HIIT) has been shown to be beneficial to athletes of all kinds, and for folks with all types of goals.

Old school cardio activity is often referred to as "steady state," meaning that you build up to a predetermined intensity level and continue working out at that level for the duration of the session. During the training session, your body obtains 50 percent of its energy by burning fat, and gets the remainder through oxygen intake, and by tapping into your glycogen and muscle deposits.

HIIT sessions, on the other hand, consist of brief high intensity intervals followed by moderate intensity recovery periods. HIIT sessions spare your muscles and are short, but are killer. A 15-minute HIIT workout 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 lean mass you have, the more fat you burn, even while you're sleeping. 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 increase your overall level of fitness in very short sessions. But even better, if your goals include muscle building and fat burning, adding HIIT to your workout schedule is a no-brainer.