Interval Fat Loss Training: Lose Fat And Gain Lean Muscle

Burn Fat Gain Muscle with Interval Fat Loss training

Can you burn fat and gain muscle at the same time? Despite what many scientists say, the answer is yes. In fact, in 1999 I designed a resistance training program for a research study where the average subject gained muscle and lost body fat – at the same time.

This was one of the first Turbulence Training style workouts I ever created, and some of the top muscle building subjects added 15 pounds of mass in just 8 weeks of training. It was amazing to watch them burn fat and gain muscle without cardio.

The subjects trained six days per week – which is more than I usually recommend, but research studies always have to get maximum results in a short amount of time. The problem with lifting that frequently is the risk of overuse injury. Fortunately, the subjects could take time off after the 8 weeks to recover.

You’ll get your best results, burn fat, and gain muscle if you train four times per week, alternating between upper and lower body workouts. In the research study program, subjects did a lower body day, a push-pull day, and a third day of shoulders and arms. They repeated each day twice per week.

But again, that is too much training…I recommend you cut back to just 4 days per week. You could do legs on one day, and push-pull-arms on the other day. You could then repeat those workouts once more later in the week, or you could do different lower and upper body workouts.

You might be thinking, how can you train your entire upper body in one workout? The answer is supersets and choosing the right exercises. For example, in the research study, we would pair chest presses with a rowing exercise in a superset, so the chest muscles could rest while the back muscles worked, and vice-versa.

We could also pair shoulder presses with chin-ups, and biceps with triceps. Those 3 supersets would give you a complete upper body workout. You could also put more emphasis on chest and back exercises in one workout of the week, if you want to build more muscle in those areas.

On the lower body days, you could pair leg exercises with ab exercises. Sometimes I will even put shoulder training on leg day, so you would squat and then do shoulder presses. I also like to use single leg exercises like split squats or lunges with abdominal exercises.

Over the years I’ve perfected these upper-body lower-body superset workouts and I’ve packaged them together in my programs like Turbulence Training for Meatheads. Those are fun, fast, effective workouts to burn fat and gain muscle on a 4-day per schedule.

But now you are thinking, what about cardio? The truth is you don’t need to do a lot – or any – cardio to burn fat and gain muscle. After all, in the research study, we didn’t allow guys to do cardio, and yet they built a LOT of muscle and decreased their body fat percentage in 8 weeks.

Heck, we didn’t even show them how to improve their diet, and they were all students eating a lot of processed foods. If we added just 1-2 interval training sessions and had them eat whole, natural foods, they would have been able to burn fat and gain muscle faster.

Thanks to Craig Ballantyne for this article

See Also

Interval Fat Loss Training for complete exercises, workouts and nutrition information on interval fat loss training