Build Muscle Up Quickly with Interval Training

You've heard it repeatedly: you cannot build muscle up and melt fat concurrently. They say that building muscle involves an increase in calories, while fat burning involves a decrease in calories. This old school wisdom is based partially in fact, but the concepts are being disproven with insights into interval-based training. The fact is, you can achieve muscle weight gain at the same time as you burn fat if you add intervals to your workouts.

Interval training isn’t completely new, but it’s more widely understood, accepted, and practiced as of late. Whereas standard cardiovascular training were looked at as the only effective ways to shed pounds, and the only effective workouts for endurance athletes, high intensity interval training (HIIT) has proven to be advantageous to athletes in all sports, and for folks with all types of goals.

Traditional cardio activity is often referred to as "steady state," which essentially means that you work up to a predetermined intensity level and maintain that level throughout the workout. During the workout, your body obtains half of its fuel by burning fat, and gets the rest through your oxygen system, and by dipping into your muscle and glycogen deposits.

High-intensity sessions, on the other hand, consist of brief maximum intensity intervals followed by lower intensity rest 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 day, enabling you to continue burning higher levels of fat for up to a day.

On top of this, because your muscles consume 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 sessions can help you increase your overall fitness level with very short sessions. Better still, if your goals include mass gain and fat burning, adding HIIT to your weekly workouts is a no-brainer.