Achieve Muscle Weight Gain While Burning Fat with High Intensity Interval Training

You've been told over and over again: you cannot build muscle up and lose fat at the same time. They say that gaining mass requires an increase in calories, while fat burning involves a decrease in calories. This conventional wisdom is based in fact, but the concepts are being shaken up with research into interval workouts. The truth is, you can accomplish muscle weight gain while you burn fat provided that you add intervals to your sessions.

Interval training isn’t completely new, but it’s more widely understood, accepted, and used as of late. Whereas standard aerobic activities were considered the only effective ways to shed weight, and the only acceptable workouts for endurance athletes, high intensity interval training (HIIT) has proven to be beneficial to athletes of all types, and for folks with wildly varying goals.

Traditional 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 workout. During the training session, your body pulls half of its fuel through your fat stores, and gets the remainder through oxygen intake, and by dipping into your glycogen and muscle deposits.

High-intensity sessions, conversely, involve quick maximum intensity intervals followed by lower intensity rest periods. HIIT sessions are muscle sparing and are short, but pack a wallop. A 15-minute HIIT workout can raise your metabolic rate for almost day, 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 muscle 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 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. Even better, if your goals include mass gain and fat burning, adding HIIT to your workout schedule is a no-brainer.