How To Supplement A HIIT Program Properly

By Russ Hollywood


In gyms around the world nowadays, HIIT is everywhere. But if you are trying to learn how to build muscle and drop unwanted body fat using this method you need to pay particular attention to one area which most gym users overlook.

The main area which needs to be looked at is pre-workout nutrition. There are many individuals who are more than prepared to go all out in the gym on a daily basis, but lack the nutritional knowledge to get the rewards their hard efforts deserve.

If you have been working out for some time already then you'll already understand how important it is to give your body the correct type of nutrients to make the most of each session you do. However, many people don't realize that high intensity training requires a slightly different tactic than regular exercise. [
See the top 5 types of hiit sessions and what they are designed for.
]

While regular cardiovascular activity works slowly on your fat stores, interval training takes a different route. It mainly focuses on your body's stores of carbohydrates. This means the focus of your nutrition needs to shift if you are to get the most from this method.

As you may already be aware, interval training's real benefits begin when you shut the gym door behind you as you leave. Your body enters a process called EPOC, also known as the afterburn effect by many trainers. This is where your body has lost so much of it's carbohydrate resources that it begins to shield what's left and instead uses your fat stores to provide you with energy. You guessed it, this results in increased fat burning and the phenomenon can go on for fourteen hours if you do thing effectively.

As you can see, what we want to be doing in the gym is depleting your carb resources as quickly as possible so that we can force the body to enter the afterburn effect immediately when you finish working out. So, for this very reason, it would be foolish to eat a big bowl of oatmeal before you trained.

Does this mean you should train on an empty stomach?

Not quite. While performing interval training on an empty stomach is slightly more beneficial than performing it with a ton of carbs in your system, there is an even better way to increase results further. The biggest mistake people tend to make when watching their carbohydrate intake is forgetting to increase protein intake. As a result their body burns off a lot of muscle. To avoid this, simply increase your protein intake. This can be done by hitting the gym after a whey protein shake instead of a carbohydrate heavy meal.

There are also many people who like using branched chain amino acids around their workouts. While this supplement is perfectly fine, there are better ways to do this. First of all, essential amino acids provide a better return than BCAA's as they include all of the amino acids which the body cannot naturally produce, rather than just the three which are more involved in building muscle. So look to replace your BCAA product with a reputable EAA supplement.

Secondly, science tells us that consuming your amino acids before your workout yields up to 30% higher uptake into the muscles, so ignore the common trend of mixing it with your post-workout protein shake. The perfect pre-workout cocktail before a high intensity interval training session would consist of around 15 grams of whey protein and a serving of essential amino acids.

While these approaches are a little different than the advice which goes with a regular training program, interval training is anything but a regular training program and there is already sufficient scientific evidence pointing towards these methods. If you want to learn how to build muscle using HIIT then you need to take a little bit of time to structure your pre-workout nutrition in order to increase results to their maximum potential.




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