Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Build Muscle Up While Burning Fat with Interval Training

By Jared Conley

You've been told a hundred times: it's impossible to build muscle up and melt fat concurrently. You've been told that building muscle involves an increase in calories, while fat burning involves a decrease in calories. This conventional wisdom is based in fact, but the beliefs are being tossed on their ears with research into interval training. The truth is, you can achieve muscle weight gain at the same time as you burn fat if you add interval training to your sessions.

Interval training isn't new, but it's more widely understood, accepted, and practiced in recent years. While traditional cardiovascular activities 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 advantageous to athletes in all fields, and for folks with varying goals.

Standard cardio activity is often referred to as "steady state," which essentially means that you work up to a certain intensity level and maintain that level throughout the training session. During the training session, your body gets 50 percent of its energy through your fat stores, and gets the remainder through your oxygen system, and by dipping into your glycogen and muscle deposits.

Interval sessions, on the other hand, involve short high intensity intervals followed by moderate intensity rest periods. HIIT sessions spare your muscles and are short, but pack a wallop. A 15-minute HIIT session can raise your resting metabolic rate for a full day, 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 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 increase your overall fitness level with very short sessions. Better still, if your goals include muscle building and fat burning, adding HIIT to your workout schedule is a no-brainer. - 16887

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