Want To Build Muscle While Burning Fat? Use Interval Training

You've been told a hundred times: it's impossible to build muscle up and melt fat at the same time.

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 been more widely understood, accepted, and implemented in recent years.

While standard cardiovascular training was looked at as the only efficient way to shed fat, and the only effective workouts for endurance athletes, high intensity interval training (HIIT) has been shown to be advantageous to athletes in all sports, and for people with wildly varying goals.

Standard aerobic activity is referred to as "steady state," which essentially means that you work up to a fixed intensity level and continue working out at that level throughout the workout.

During the workout, your body gets half of its fuel by burning fat, and gets the rest through oxygen intake, and by tapping into your glycogen and muscle stores.

Interval sessions, conversely, consist of short 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.

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 muscles, but also helps you build muscles 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.