Will HIIT Help You To Build Muscle?

By Russ Howe


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?

While there are certainly multiple benefits to be had from a good cardiovascular exercise plan, most people don't find cardio as interesting as weight training. This is particularly true with men, who seem far more interested in resistance workouts than hitting the treadmill or elliptical trainer.

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 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.

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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