Saturday, March 30, 2013

Should You Do HIIT If You Want To Build Muscle Or Lose Fat?

By Howe Russ


Despite growing in popularity over the last ten years or so, HIIT remains an area of health and fitness still shrouded in mystery. If you are attempting to determine how to build muscle effectively this is one area you definitely need to look into.

This is a form of cardiovascular activity with a major twist. Today we're going to look at this in more depth and answer the question everybody is asking. Is this a good form of exercise for muscular growth?

If most men were honest, they'd happily admit that they don't do enough cardiovascular exercise. It's often seen as the boring alternative to resistance training and they don't have the same level of drive for it.

Many individuals wrongly presume that cardio exercise is purely for weight loss, or they believe the age old misconception that treadmills are for women and weights are for guys.

However, if your primary goal is hypertrophy you are the exact type of person who should be performing regular cardiovascular workouts and one of the best forms of this is high intensity interval training. Not only is it great for fat loss, it'll also help you to build more lean tissue.

There are several key differences between high intensity cardio sessions and steady state workouts. If you've ever used an exercise bike for an hour at a steady pace you've probably felt a little bit bored at certain stages. That's one of the main drawbacks to this style of training and something which high intensity sessions will eliminate.

By constantly changing the resistance and intensity level of your gym session you will be able to challenge your body in ways it has never been pushed before. In fact, many of the benefits to this type of training have more in common with weights than they do with cardiovascular exercise.

While performing a resistance exercise your body is tapping into it's anaerobic exercise. This is the same system you'll use while performing any high intensity cardio workouts, too.

Due to the fact that our body uses the same energy system during interval training as we do for resistance workouts, we actually burn calories in the same way. You may have already heard that a resistance workout causes your body to continue burning calories at an increased rate for hours after you leave the gym. This also happens with interval training, whereas regular cardio doesn't have these 'afterburn' benefits.

Despite growing in popularity over the last few years, HIIT remains a largely unused form of cardiovascular exercise. Most gym users believe that they need to punish themselves with long, dull sessions on bikes and treadmills to lose fat and it is simply not true. If you are learning how to build muscle more effectively, this form of training will work very nicely alongside your resistance training.




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