Fat Loss 4 Idiots Secret

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Build Muscle Up While Burning Fat with Interval Training

By Jared Conley

You've been told a hundred times: you can't build muscle up and lose fat concurrently. They say that building mass involves an increase in calories, while fat burning requires a decrease in calories. This conventional wisdom is partially accurate, but the concepts are being tossed on their ears with insights into interval-based workouts. The truth is, you can achieve muscle weight gain while you burn fat provided that you add intervals to your sessions.

Interval training isn't new, but it's more widely understood, accepted, and implemented in recent years. While standard cardiovascular training were looked at as the only efficient ways 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.

On top of this, because your muscles burn calories during every minute of the day, the more lean mass you have, the more fat you burn, even while you're sitting still. 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. Better still, if your goals include muscle building and fat shedding, adding HIIT to your workout schedule is a no-brainer. - 17274

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