It’s hard to find people who aren’t interested in both losing weight and gaining muscle mass. However, there are a lot of different training systems out there and it can be difficult to tell systems which have been proven to work and those which have just been put out there to make a fast buck. You don’t have to spend all of your time at the weight bench to get that body you’ve always wanted - and you ought not to believe everything you hear on the infomercials either.
If you want to gain muscle while losing weight, the way to go about it is to work on your body as a whole, which is what interval training does. Rather than running for hours and hours every week - which will only build leg muscle, interval training instead works on all of the muscle groups throughout your body in order to lose weight and build muscle evenly.
Interval training works by gradually increasing the intensity of your workouts, instead of trying to start off running several miles at once. You can pick from different exercises that target the same major muscle groups, and even workouts that target various muscle groups all at the same time. Instead of doing the same routine over and over, you can mix it up and get even better results.
Unlike some other types of exercising, with interval training your muscles can recover fairly quickly from the workout. Instead of being sore for a week, and unable to workout to boot, you should be refreshed and ready to go in no time.
Best of all, interval training is fun. Many exercise routines are boring (for example, running in place on a treadmill for hours or doing exercise videos again and again, you get the idea). With interval training you can do different exercises all the time. As long as you exercise the target muscle groups that need to be worked on, you’ll get the same great results.
You’ve heard all about the importance of metabolism, and probably lament that friend we all have that has the amazingly speedy, natural metabolism. Well it’s time to catch up to that friend and interval training can help. Interval training speeds up your metabolism a great deal. One of the ways it does this is by activating many different muscle groups at the same time, signaling your body that it needs to burn more calories to recover, build muscle and keep up with the workout.
Interval training also fills the important function of working out your cardiovascular system. You don’t need to do intensive cardio exercises for an hour or more - your heart and lungs are getting a workout as you do even low impact exercises! Your breathing and increased heart rate during workouts take care of this even as you work on other muscle groups.
Interval training isn’t just a new fad or weight loss scam, but an actual way to lose unwanted fat and gain back muscle mass. By performing low impact exercises that work on the same or several muscle groups, you can burn off fat and tone your muscles at the same time. It won’t leave the muscles sore and unable to work, but will provide even better results than any cardio exercise ever could.
