October 29, 2008
I bet you’ve been told a hundred times: it’s impossible to build muscle up and burn fat at the same time. They say that building mass requires 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 tossed on their ears with insights into interval workouts. The truth is, you can achieve muscle weight gain at the same time as you burn fat if you add intervals to your sessions.
Interval training isn’t new, but it’s more widely understood, accepted, and practiced as of late. Whereas standard aerobic activities were looked at as 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 advantageous to athletes of all kinds, and for folks with many different goals.
Old school aerobic activity is referred to as “steady state,” which essentially means that you build up to a fixed intensity level and continue working out at that level throughout the training session. During the session, your body obtains 50 percent of its fuel by burning fat, and gets the remainder through oxygen intake, and by tapping into your muscle and glycogen stores.
HIIT sessions, on the other hand, consist of brief maximum intensity intervals followed by lower intensity rest periods. HIIT sessions are muscle sparing and are quick, but pack a wallop. A fifteen-minute HIIT session can raise your base metabolism for almost 24 hours, enabling you to continue burning higher levels of fat for up to a day.
On top of 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 inactive. 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 with very short sessions. Even better, if your goals include mass gain and fat shedding, adding HIIT to your workout schedule is a no-brainer.
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