Is HIIT Good For Muscle Growth?

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?

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.

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.

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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