Exercise, Build Muscle Up Quickly with High Intensity Interval Training

I bet you've been told time and time again: it's impossible to build muscle up and melt fat concurrently. They say that building mass involves an increase in calories, while fat burning involves a decrease in calories. This old school wisdom is based partially in fact, but the beliefs are being tossed on their ears with research into interval-based workouts. The fact is, you can accomplish muscle weight gain at the same time as you burn fat provided that 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 training were considered the only effective ways to shed fat, and the only effective workouts for endurance athletes, high intensity interval training (HIIT) has proven to be beneficial to athletes of all kinds, and for folks with many different goals.

Standard cardio activity is often referred to as "steady state," meaning that you work up to a fixed intensity level and continue working out at that level for the duration of the training session. During the session, your body gets 50 percent of its energy through your fat stores, and gets the rest through oxygen intake, and by dipping into your muscle and glycogen stores.

High-intensity sessions, on the other hand, involve brief high intensity intervals followed by lower intensity rest periods. HIIT sessions are muscle sparing and are short, but pack a wallop. A 15-minute HIIT session can raise your metabolic rate for a full 24 hours, enabling you to keep 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 capacity is increased.

The bottom line is that regardless of your fitness goals, HIIT workouts can help you increase your overall fitness level with very short sessions. But even better, if your goals include muscle gain and fat burning, adding HIIT to your weekly workouts is a no-brainer.