Thursday, August 1, 2013

Is HIIT Good For Muscle Growth?

By Howe Russ


There is so much conflicting advice in the gym that most people find it almost impossible to learn how to build muscle effectively. One of the biggest areas of concern surrounds HIIT.

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.

Naturally, this behavior stems from a largely untrue stereotype that cardio is for women and weights are for men. This age old belief is something which has held countless gym members back for years and it's built upon lies.

Believe it or not, if your main target in the gym is to build more lean muscle then cardiovascular exercise will indeed play a huge role in your accomplishments. There are several effective forms of cardio which improve fitness and hypertrophy, most notably high intensity interval training.

There is a massive difference between the steady pace of regular cardio, often billed as boring, compared to that of a high intensity session. Despite being performed on the same equipment, it's a completely different style of workout.

Interval training is very simple when you get down to the finer details of it. Basically your aim is to switch from a moderate level to a high level every so often, causing your body to be unable to adapt. This will have similar effects on your muscles to a resistance workout.

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.

Things get even better when you look at how your body burns calories during this type of training. During a normal session your body stops burning calories when you stop exercising. However, if you have performed an interval session your body will continue to burn calories at an increased rate for 16 hours afterwards! This is also known as 'the afterburn effect'.

As you can see, learning how to build muscle isn't necessarily all about hitting the weights. HIIT is a great way to increase lean tissue, with the added benefit of stripping away unwanted body fat at an increased rate.




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