Achieve Muscle Weight Gain While Burning Fat With Hiit

You've heard it a hundred times: you can't build muscle up and burn fat at the same time. Building muscle 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 tossed on their ears with research into interval training. The fact is, you can achieve muscle weight gain while your burn fat if you add intervals to your workouts.

Interval training isn't new, but it's more widely understood, accepted, and implemented these days. Whereas standard aerobic activities were considered the only effective ways to burn fat, and the only acceptable workouts for endurance athletes, high intensity interval training (HIIT) has been shown to be beneficial to athletes of all kinds, and for people with all types of goals.

Traditional aerobic activity is referred to as "steady state," meaning that you build up to a certain intensity level and maintain that level throughout the workout. During the workout, your body gains 50 percent of its energy by burning fat, and gets the rest through your oxygen system, and by cutting into your muscle and glycogen stores.

HIIT sessions, on the other hand, involve brief high intensity intervals followed by moderate intensity rest periods. HIIT sessions are muscle sparing and are short, but pack a wallop. A fifteen-minute HIIT session can raise your metabolic rate for a full 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 muscle you have, the more fat you burn, even while you're inactive. 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 burn improve your overall level fitness in very short sessions. But even better, if your goals include mass gain and fat burning, adding HIIT to your weekly workouts is a no-brainer.

By: Jared Conley

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Like many time-strapped professionals, Jared is interested in staying fit in as little time as possible. Through research, experimentation, and professional consultations, Jared has learned how anyone can build muscle up quickly, burn fat, build explosive power, and improve conditioning through short, focused workouts. Jared shares what he's learned through his muscle weight gain blog.