Saturday, March 23, 2013

How To Use Nutrition To Get The Most Out Of HIIT

By Russ Hollywood


Despite being very popular, HIIT is a subject which many people low very little about. It requires you to take a slightly different approach in your training in order to get the most from the multiple benefits it has to offer. If you're trying to discover how to build muscle with this style of exercise, then this is crucial.

Of course, we are talking about nutrition. In fact it is the pre-workout period of nutrition which we will be discussing in more depth today because this is the area which many people don't pay any attention to at all.

Before you workout you need to ensure that your body has been supplied with the best nutrients to perform the tough session ahead. If you do this then you can potentially increase your results by up to 30%, so it is worth taking a few moments to look into the latest science on the subject. []

Before you can work out what you should be eating prior to a high intensity interval workout you need to look at what type of food your body uses for fuel during this type of exercise because it's slightly different to regular training. While long, steady state cardio primarily burns fat stores, albeit at a very slow rate, high intensity intervals uses your carbohydrate stores for fuel.

The real benefits of this training happen after you leave the gym, where your body continues burning off calories at an increased rate for up to 14 hours. You may have heard this phenomenon called the afterburn effect. Instead of slowly chipping away at your fat stores and then ending the process when you leave the gym like regular cardio exercise, a high intensity workout depletes your carbohydrate stores first before going to work on fat stores. In doing this, your body enters a process called EPOC after your training has finished. It protects what little carb stores you have left and burns off excess fat instead. This process lasts an incredibly long time, and one calorie burnt during a high intensity session equates to around nine calories burnt during a long cardio workout.

So as you can see, the quicker your body can deplete those carbohydrate stores during a high intensity training session, the better! This means there's very little point in consuming a carb rich meal before you train as you'd merely be delaying the process in the gym.

This is why many people choose to workout on an empty stomach. But is this approach really the best way to maximize results?

Not quite. While you should look to avoid heavy carbohydrate sources before you train, you can actually increase your results if you use protein as this will work to protect your lean muscle tissue from being burnt off during an intense training. This means not only will you lose fat, you'll also hang onto and maybe even build more lean muscle tissue!

Furthermore, many people like to add a BCAA supplement to their post-workout nutrition. Not only is it more beneficial to take it before you train, but it's actually recommended that you swap out the BCAA's for EAA's. The BCAA products you see on the market only contain the three main branched chain amino acids. However, BCAA's are like a car, they need all parts in order to function properly. Essential Amino Acids contain everything your body cannot produce by itself and have been shown to increase uptake into the muscles by 30%.

Most people who use the gym these days are familiar with protein shakes but they take them after they workout. Research reveals that you can dramatically increase your success if you also consume 15-20 grams of whey protein before you perform any high intensity activity, as well as your regular shake afterwards. This makes perfect sense because your body would naturally begin looking at your protein stores once it's carbohydrates are running low.

Getting the right kind of nutrition into your system before you train can be crucial when performing HIIT sessions on a regular basis. Learning how to build muscle is often a game of opinion, with many exercise enthusiasts lost in a sea of misinformation. By looking at the very latest science on the subject, you can get more from every session in the gym.




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