Hard to Kill Programming Methodology: Part 1 - Strength

Welcome to the Garage Gym Athlete Podcast! Today, we’re kicking off a special series diving into the Hard to Kill programming methodology, starting with its foundation: strength. Whether you're a long-time Garage Gym Athlete or a newcomer, this series will break down how our programming optimizes both performance and longevity, making you not just fit for today, but for a lifetime.

What is the Hard to Kill Programming Methodology?

The Hard to Kill methodology is designed to balance peak performance with long-term resilience. It prepares athletes for daily challenges—whether on the battlefield, in life, or simply in the gym—while building a strong foundation for health and fitness over the years. At its core, this methodology emphasizes efficiency, ensuring you achieve maximum results, even with limited training time.

Why Strength is the Foundation

Strength is the base of the fitness pyramid. It unlocks your potential across all other fitness domains, whether it’s:

• Running faster
• Reducing injury risk
• Enhancing athleticism
• Improving overall resilience

Without a solid strength foundation, progress in other areas becomes limited. Strength not only enables you to perform better today but also supports longevity, ensuring your body stays robust for decades.

Understanding the Strength Continuum

To truly master strength training, you must understand the strength continuum, which consists of four components:

1. Strength
2. Strength-Speed
3. Speed-Strength
4. Speed

In this first installment, we’re focusing solely on strength, the foundation upon which all other components are built.

Absolute Strength vs. Relative Strength

Strength can be divided into two primary categories:

1. Absolute Strength

   • The maximal force you can exert, regardless of body weight.
   • Example: A 500-pound back squat.

2. Relative Strength

   • Your strength relative to your body weight.
   • Example: Pull-ups, where body weight plays a significant role.

Both types of strength are critical and complement each other within the Hard to Kill programming framework.

Key Concept: Low-Speed Conditions

Low-speed conditions are the cornerstone of building strength. When lifting heavy weights or performing high-resistance movements, your speed naturally decreases. This is crucial because:

• Maximal force production occurs at low speeds.
• Neural adaptations improve, enhancing strength over time.
• Mechanical tension increases, essential for hypertrophy (muscle growth).

If you take away one thing from this post, remember: Strength training thrives in low-speed conditions.

How to Build Strength: Programming Tips

We rely on Prilepin’s Chart, a proven framework for effective strength programming. Here’s how you can apply it:

1. For 80-90% of Your One-Rep Max (1RM):

• Reps per set: 2-4
• Total reps per session: 15 (optimal range: 10-20)
• Example: 5 sets of 3 reps or 3 sets of 5 reps.

2. For 90%+ of Your 1RM:

• Reps per set: 1-2
• Total reps per session: 5-7 (optimal range: 4-10)
• Example: 5 sets of 1 or 2 sets of 3.

3. Volume and Time Under Tension:

• For hypertrophy (muscle growth), focus on volume and time under tension.
• Example: Longer sets with controlled tempos.

Safety First: When to Push Limits

While lifting heavy is essential for building strength, training near your 1RM increases the risk of injury. Stay in the 80-90% range for most sessions, reserving 90%+ lifts for occasional testing (1-2 times per year). This approach minimizes risk while maximizing progress.

Why Strength Comes First

Strength is the prerequisite for all other areas of the strength continuum. Before tackling speed, explosiveness, or advanced athletic movements, you need a solid base of raw strength. Skipping this step is like building a house without a foundation—it’s simply unsustainable.

Start Building Strength with Garage Gym Athlete

The Hard to Kill track incorporates strength training as a critical component, ensuring you build the base necessary for achieving peak performance and long-term fitness. Whether you’re working toward injury reduction, faster running times, or enhanced athleticism, strength will always be your starting point.

Join Us Today

If you want to experience Hard to Kill programming firsthand, head over to Garage Gym Athlete and sign up for a free trial. See how our athletes are building strength, improving performance, and optimizing for longevity—all while training smarter, not longer.

Final Thoughts

Strength is more than just lifting heavy—it’s about creating a foundation that supports every aspect of your fitness journey. Stay tuned for the next installment in the Hard to Kill Programming Methodology series, where we’ll dive deeper into the strength continuum and explore strength-speed training.

Remember: If you don’t kill comfort, comfort will kill you.

Garage Gym Athlete Workout of the Week

Podcast Transcript

Jerred: Welcome to the Garage Gym Athlete podcast. I'm Jared Moon, and today I'm kicking off a programming series. If you're new to Garage Gym Athlete, or this is your first episode, or hell, if you just haven't paid attention for the last couple of years, Garage Gym Athlete is all about programming. That's what I love, that's what we love, and that's what we stress to our athletes.

It's it's The efficient manner of programming that can produce the most results because any idiot can spend 90 minutes, 120 minutes in the gym and see results. But when you only have those 40, minutes to train a couple of times per week, how can we get the biggest bang for our buck and still see the results that we want?

And I. Very firmly believe that you do that through programming. And it's something I've been studying for decades at this point in my life. And throughout the garage gym athlete podcast, I've gone over different areas of training, programming, methodologies, ideas, science, all of these things. But I want to start to condense things down into a series here.

So what I'm going to be going over is a 13 part series that I've On the hard to kill programming methodology. And each one of these, these 13 areas are part of how we program across a 30 day window. Within our hard to kill track at garage gym athlete, but also within its own method and what I'd like to culminate with or build up to is something I've been calling project Delta, and this is where we're going to take the hard to kill programming methodology, and we are going to combine it with some of the movement patterns and ideas that we've gotten from another programming methodology I created called body geometry.

And ultimately mashing those two together in a very elegant sequence to create what, like I said, we've been calling Project Delta. But without any more of the backstory here, let's get in to Part 1. So this is Hard to Kill Programming Methodology Part 1, Strength. We're going to be talking about Strength today.

So I am talking about the hard to kill programming methodology in what this method does. It optimizes both performance and longevity, so it ensures that you're beyond prepared for any daily obstacle, all while making it tougher for father time to knock you off. Okay. So it's making you hard to kill. On the daily, whether that's on the battlefield or in life in general, it's making you hard to kill more resilient, but it's also making you hard to kill over time, optimizing the things that are the most important for you to live a long, healthy life.

That is what the hard to kill track is about. It's blending both of those things, performance today, longevity in life. So let's kick off part one today. We are covering strength and what you have to realize about strength is that it is a continuum in the strength continuum. There are four different areas.

There's strength, strength, speed, speed, strength, and speed. Now we're going to cover all four of those strength areas within the continuum. But today is just about strength in an effort to quickly explain how to utilize it, why it's important and how we program it. We're just going to be doing one and that is strength today.

So the best way to view strength is that it is the base of the pyramid and it's the base of the period pyramid, not only in the strength continuum, but it's the base of the pyramid for all of fitness. It opens the door to anything else you want to do, whether that's running faster, further injury reduction, athleticism, or just being more resilient in your day to day life, you want to be strong strength opens the doors.

For everything for you getting better at anything and everything. Now, sometimes people get confused when we talk about just strength and I have some really easy ways for you to conceptualize strength and I'm going to cover them, but I don't want to get too far into the weeds, but I'm going to introduce a few other ideas or terms that you have to know.

So there's absolute strength and there's relative strength. So absolute strength is just pure strength. This is ultimately what is being assessed when you are lifting a barbell. It doesn't matter if you weigh 180 pounds or 280 pounds. If you want to back squat 500 pounds, that's just absolute strength.

Now we could argue it's going to be easier for one person than the other, but when we're talking about absolute raw strength, it's just how much, how much weight has been moved. What is the maximal force that has been exerted? And we don't take into account as much as, as how much you weigh relative your body weight.

Relative to your body weight. That's where relative strength comes in. Relative strength is moving your body. It's how strong you are in relation to your own body. Because likewise, if I'm 180 pound male trying to squat 300 pounds, that is a certain level of difficulty. But if you are a 280 pound male trying to lift 300 pounds, that's going to be a lot easier for you.

Now, bar, bar weight versus bar weight. It's going to be the same, but it's going to be a lot easier for the relative strength athlete, the person who weighs 280 to move 300. Likewise, when we get to pull ups. The 180 pound male is going to be able to knock out a pull up a lot easier than the 280 pound male.

So relative strength and absolute strength do fit under the strength continuum, but it's a matter of how you execute these things. So absolute maximal force. Is under the strength continuum and also relatively relative strength is under the strength and in the strength continuum and even hypertrophy, which is building muscle because building strength alone is not always building muscle and building muscle is not always building up the most maximal strength.

Okay, so here's the easy way for you to think about it. If you want to. Exert the most force that you possibly can. You want to be the strongest athlete that you possibly can, or you even want to build muscle or gain relative strength. You want to do that under low speed conditions. Now, I could have people argue with me about this, but in this is going to cut through about 90 percent of the crap and all the rhetoric and other things that we don't have to discuss for you to understand it.

If you can understand that developing maximal strength, building muscle and relatively strength typically, not a hundred percent of the time, but typically it requires low speed conditions. You're going to understand whether or not you're actually training strength. Okay. So low speed conditions is like, if you remember nothing else from this podcast, remember if I want to get stronger, I need low speed conditions.

Now we're going to cover other parts of the continuum, right? So strength, speed, speed, strength, speed. We're going to get into moving dynamically, moving fast. What that is, what that does for your athleticism. We're going to get into all that within this series, but we're just talking about strength and what I've defined so far.

You want that in low speed conditions. That's the best way to build it up because lifting heavyweights or performing higher resistance movements inherently limits your speed because if you're lifting near maximal, you're going to be going the slowest that you could possibly go. If you're lifting submaximal, you're going to be able to move a lot faster.

So allowing for maximum force production and neural adaptation, that's what happens when you are training strength, high resistance, it's going to limit your speed. So low speed conditions. Now, the same is true of building muscle. If you want to build muscle, the two most important things for building muscle are going to be volume and time under tension.

You get time under tension by. Quite simply, putting more time under the barbell, lifting the weight for longer. Mechanical tension is created over time. So if you want to build muscle, low speed conditions, another great way to do this, coupled with volume. And now you're starting to build muscle. But let's talk about programming strength specifically to kind of round this out and how you could utilize this method.

We love to use Prillipin's chart. So Prillipin, Pilipin was a weightlifting coach back in the day and he documented all sorts of things and he kind of stumbled across this chart of the percentage of your one rep max, the intensity, the rep sets, the optimal rep ranges, and then the total range for you to be able to see progress in that given area.

Now, if you're wanting to build maximal strength, you're going to be needing to lift 80 to 90 or 90 plus percent of your one rep max. So typically when you are working with strength, you are going to want to know your one rep max, but if you don't know your one rep max, You can just go back to the overall thing.

I want you to remember for this episode. Is this a low speed bar, a low bar speed condition for me? Am I moving slowly? Not because you want to move slowly, but because the weight is so heavy, you are forced to limit your speed. You can't move any faster. If you're doing that, then you're getting stronger and we don't have to worry about what percentage of your one rep max you're lifting.

But if you do want to get into the weeds with it. 80 to 90, 90 plus percent is where you want to live to build strength, maximal force, and all of those things that will help you build strength, time under tension. And when you're doing that, if you're in the 80 to 90 percent rep range, 80 to 90 percent of your one rep rep, one rep max, you're going to be wanting to do two to four sets.

The ultimate rep range that you're the ultimate amount of reps you're going to want to hit in the day in the training session is going to be 15 with a total range anywhere between 10 to 20 if you can check all those boxes. Hey, like I want to get 15 total reps. I'm going to do three sets. So you're doing three sets of five.

Or five sets of three. However you want to break it, you're going to fall in that optimal rep range category for building strength. Now to push that over the edge, if you're really trying to get to that near maximal effort, you really want to exert as much force as possible. You, you're going to 90 plus percent.

Now you're typically only, only going to be doing one to two sets. The optimal reps here are going to be a five to seven and the optimal range is going to be four to 10. So not a lot of repetitions. You could do five sets of one. You could do two sets of three, two sets of two. It does not have to be a lot at this maximal range.

And you can stack these things within a given session too. You could hit. You know, a couple of sets of 80 to 90%, one to two sets of 90%. And you're really getting towards that maximal load. Now, the only thing that you have to keep in mind is the higher towards your, the higher end of your one rep max that you go, the greater chance of injury incident appears.

So the chance of you getting injured, putting unnecessary force somewhere. So I typically don't like to go past 90 percent for athletes most of the time, unless we're testing something once to twice a year. So that 80 to 90 percent is really the sweet spot for the chance of injury being the least within heavy weights that is.

And then also being able to build the most maximal force and exert the most force and get that time under tension that's required. So that is ultimately how you program it. Now we program strength, At Garage Gym Athlete and the Hard to Kill track mainly because, like I said, it opens the door to anything else you want to do.

Running faster, injury reduction, athleticism. It is the base of the pyramid to all fitness and specifically in strength. When we get into the later categories of strength, speed, speed, strength, and speed, you have to know that strength is the prerequisite to all of those other things. So if you want to do things that are more athletic, more explosive, some people want to try and work these in reverse and you really shouldn't, you need the base of the pyramid.

Strength is the most important thing you can build as an athlete, especially in our hard to kill. Programming methodology. So this is why we started with strength. It is the most important thing that you can do. So that is it for this one. This is part one of our hard to kill programming methodology strength.

Now, if you're one of our athletes, thank you so much for being an athlete. If you want to see what this programming looks like in action, Go to garagegymathlete. com, sign up for a free trial. We would love to have you. You can experiment with our programming and see what it looks like. And in real time and, and see what results that you can see.

And our athletes have been seeing for a very, very long time. All right. That's it for this one. Remember if you don't kill comfort, comfort will kill you.