Hard to Kill Programming Methodology: Part 10 - Glycolitic System

The Hard to Kill Programming Methodology at Garage Gym Athlete is a blend of performance and longevity, helping athletes become well-rounded, resilient, and capable of handling any physical demand. As we near the final stages of our energy system training series, we dive into one of the most grueling but beneficial systems to train: the Glycolytic System—also known as the Lactic System or the "Pain" Energy System.

If you’re looking to push past physical barriers, develop explosive power, and increase lactate tolerance, this is the system you need to train. But be warned—it’s painful, and many athletes avoid it.

What is the Glycolytic Energy System?

The glycolytic energy system supports high-intensity efforts lasting approximately 30 seconds to 2 minutes. This system primarily utilizes stored glycogen (carbohydrates) for energy, producing lactate as a byproduct.

You've felt it before—that burning sensation in your muscles, the feeling of hitting a wall, the struggle to push through. That’s the glycolytic system in action. The key to training this system effectively is increasing your capacity to tolerate and clear lactate, which allows you to maintain higher intensity efforts for longer.

Why Train the Glycolytic System?

While aerobic (oxidative) and strength training provide the foundation for overall fitness, glycolytic training takes things to the next level, offering benefits such as:

✅ Improved Work Capacity – Enables longer, high-intensity efforts before fatigue sets in.
✅ Increased Lactate Clearance – Helps your body recycle lactate as an energy source, reducing muscle burn.
✅ Better Emergency Response – Whether it’s sprinting to catch a child or responding to a critical situation, this system is crucial for fast, intense bursts of effort.
✅ Mental Toughness – Glycolytic training is brutally hard, but pushing through builds mental resilience that carries over into other aspects of life and training.

How to Train the Glycolytic System

The key to effective glycolytic training is work-to-rest ratios and maximal intensity during work intervals.

🏋️ Work Duration:

• 30 seconds to 2 minutes of high-intensity effort
• Can extend beyond 2 minutes for advanced athletes

🛑 Rest Duration:

• 1:3 to 1:5 work-to-rest ratio
• Example: 30 seconds of max effort → Rest 90-150 seconds
• Longer rests allow for higher repeatability and sustained effort

⚡ Intensity Level:

• 85-95% max effort (not a casual pace—you should be pushing yourself hard)
• Effort adjusts based on duration (e.g., a 30-second sprint is near max effort, while a 90-second effort is slightly lower intensity)

Best Glycolytic Workouts

🚴 Airdyne or Row Sprints (Classic Pain Workout)

• 30 seconds max effort
• 90-150 seconds rest
• Repeat for 6-8 rounds

🏃‍♂️ 400m Sprint Intervals

• Sprint 400m
• Rest 2-3 minutes
• Repeat for 4-6 rounds

🏋️‍♂️ Kettlebell Swings & Burpees

• 30-45 seconds of explosive kettlebell swings
• Rest 2-3 minutes
• Repeat for 5-7 rounds

🔥 Assault Bike Death Intervals

• 90 seconds max effort
• Rest 4-6 minutes
• Repeat for 3-5 rounds

Common Mistakes in Glycolytic Training

🚫 Not Pushing Hard Enough – Many people think they’re training glycolytically, but they aren’t going hard enough. You should be near failure by the end of your work intervals.

🚫 Not Allowing Enough Rest – If you shorten your rest periods too much, your performance decreases drastically, and you lose the intended training effect.

🚫 Skipping Glycolytic Training Altogether – This is the most painful training system, and many athletes avoid it. But it develops serious power, resilience, and emergency response capabilities.

Who Should Train the Glycolytic System?

🔹 Military, Law Enforcement, First Responders – Essential for quick, explosive responses.
🔹 Athletes in Combat Sports (MMA, BJJ, Wrestling) – Helps maintain power and endurance through high-intensity rounds.
🔹 Sprinters & Short-Distance Runners – Maximizes anaerobic performance.
🔹 Anyone Who Wants to Be Ready for Anything – If you train to be hard to kill, glycolytic training is a must.

Do You Really Need Glycolytic Training?

Most people can get 80-90% of their fitness from aerobic endurance and strength training. If your goal is simply to be healthy and active, you don’t necessarily need to train the glycolytic system.

But if you want to be ready for real-world challenges, build mental toughness, and push your body to new limits, this is where you separate yourself from the pack.

At Garage Gym Athlete, we don’t train this system every day—but when we do, we go all in. If you want to unlock your true potential, join us and let us program it for you.

Ready to Take Your Training to the Next Level?

If you’re serious about developing real-world fitness, you need glycolytic training in your program. But training it correctly is critical.

✅ Join Garage Gym Athlete today and get a free trial of the Hard to Kill Programming Methodology—expertly designed to balance strength, endurance, and energy system development.

👉 Sign up now at GarageGymAthlete.com.

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

Garage Gym Athlete Workout of the Week

Podcast Transcript

Jerred:  All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the garage gym athlete podcast. We are continuing in our series and we're actually getting closer to the end. So whether you've loved it or you've hated it, it's going to be over soon. And we'll be talking about project Delta, some new things, um, and. I'm looking forward to all that, but I do want to finish this, uh, you know, series strong.

We're in energy systems right now. And if you are just picking this up, we are talking about our hard to kill programming methodology, which is a blend between longevity training. Which can be a bit boring at times. And performance, which can be a lot of fun, but also lead to injury if not done correctly.

We like to combine the two in our hard to kill programming methodology at Garage Gym Athlete. Because it's very effective, it's a lot of fun, and it's something that you can do for a very, very long time. And be able to do a lot of cool stuff. And hopefully live a long time without fitness being the limiter to that long life.

So, today we are in, uh, episode 9 of the series, and there are 13 episodes. I mean, we're in episode 10, and there are 13. We finished up 9, um, in the last episode, talking about And opening the door to energy systems. And I talked specifically about the oxidative or aerobic system. And today we'll continue down like stair stepping backwards.

Um, so today we'll be talking about the glycolytic system. Uh, the anaerobic glycolytic system. Um, a lot of different names for it. Lactic system. You, we call it the pain. Energy system. But one thing I want to talk about before we dive into this specific energy system today is something that's important about training energy systems.

And you'll kind of see as we go through all three energy systems is that we are typically talking about interval training with all of these. And the, the main reason behind that is because that is what the science supports in training energy systems. What you have to know is energy systems are not just so, they're not super black and white.

Like we're utilizing some degree of every energy system, um, throughout our lives or throughout training. It's not like your body's like, okay, I'm shutting off the oxidative and I'm only going to be doing the glycolytic. Now, you know, there's always going to be some crossover to these things, but when you want to try and pinpoint an energy system, then you want to go by the best practices that are available, you know, scientific methods or what's been tested.

And that's why we try to target it with interval training and work to rest ratios, because if you want to improve your glycolytic system, meaning you want to go higher intensity for longer duration. Um, you know, then you want to specifically train that you don't want to like accidentally train it over years, even though you could when you start to pinpoint it, you see a lot of progress, you know, a lot faster than normal.

And another thing to hit on because there is so much interval work in all of the energy system training is the main thing that we're looking for is sustainability and repeatability. And it doesn't really matter. The energy system. Typically, people talk about sustainability and repeatability when they're talking about aerobic efforts.

We talk about it in all these all of the energy systems. So as you stair step down from aerobic to glycolytic and then ultimately the creatine phosphate energy system, what you have to know is that Once you can no longer sustain and repeat the bout, you're not getting as much of a benefit. And this is true across all of them.

So I'm going to be talking about glycolytic today. But if the output was, say, how many meters you ran or rode in a certain amount of time, you don't want that just to be clicking down. So, you know, an example is, you know, let's get away from any kind of time domain or energy system, just a very black and white example, say I was doing some sort of interval and I was getting 200 meters my first round on my second round, I'd want the rest to be long enough to where I could get 200 meters the second round, but I also want to stay within the work to rest ratios of, you know, standard practice energy systems.

But if I'm going 200, 190, 180, 170. 160. I'm not as getting much as much benefit from the training. I want to get as much sustainability and repeatability as I possibly can. And so this is also a good gauge of when the training session is probably over or where you're not really getting as much benefit.

And the reason I bring it up in the glycolytic training is because a lot of people think they're doing glycolytic training, but they're not actually doing it. And I talked about this in the oxidative. It's like, well, I'm sticking to the work to rest ratios. It's like, yeah, but you don't have the correct intensity.

And that's going to be absolutely true in the glycolytic system. It's like, well, I'm, I'm doing 30 seconds. I'm doing a minute and a half, like whatever, whatever it is. And I'll get into that in just a second, but you're not going hard enough or you're not able to sustain it. So for instance, going back to that example, say I got 200 meters, 198, 201.

And then. You know, let's, let's say you've got one more 197, but then there's this big drop off. You got like 182. You're probably done training. You could keep going and there's, there's going to be benefit to that, right? There's just going to be benefit to exercising in general, you know, sweating, breathing, all those kinds of things, but you're not really specifically training the glycolytic system anymore.

So it's not that beneficial to keep, you know, running your head into the wall. And so that's just something I want you to know across all energy systems, really across all interval training if you're looking to improve quickly. And then another thing that you have to know specifically about the glycolytic system is that there is a prerequisite here, not like I need to open up another continuum.

But to truly train the glycolytic system, you have to have some base level of strength. You really do. Like, that's why if I take, um, an advanced athlete and put them on an airdyne, and I take a beginner athlete who's never done anything and put them on an airdyne, and I have them both, and I'm like, hey, max effort, 30 seconds, it's gonna hurt a lot more for the advanced athlete, even though they're more well trained because they are just able to produce so much more power.

And they're going to go to that place while the beginner athletes not going to really know how to pace themselves. They're not going to hit it as hard. They don't have the strength to even like bring a high level of power output even if they're trying really hard. So it would be best for beginner athletes to go back and build a strength base and the strength continuum we were talking about before you even get to this type of training.

All right, so let's round this one out talking about the glycolytic system. So this system supports high intensity efforts lasting roughly 30 seconds to two minutes. And it is characterized by the accumulation and production of lactate. You've all felt it. Um, and a cool thing about lactate is like the body can recycle, reuse lactate as an energy source.

But ultimately, the more you train it, you can improve your capacity to tolerate and clear lactate. And There's a lot of research. I don't, I don't have the time in this episode to talk about lactate, but it's just such a cool byproduct. Like people just thought it was something that made your muscle burn and was uncomfortable.

Then they found out that your brain can utilize this, your muscle, like your, it can go back to the liver and your muscles can like reutilize lactate as an energy source. But you have to be incredibly well trained for all of these things to be true. So it's really cool if you get really good, the glycolytic system, um, To start playing around with lactate and being able to ultimately not fatigue.

It's kind of like going back to that power endurance, like where you're just like a beast. Very similar. Like if you can really master the glycolytic system and you train it a lot, it's going to be really crappy to train it, but ultimately you're going to see a lot of progress. So like I said, the work duration is typically 30 seconds to two minutes.

I argue that you could probably go a little bit past two minutes if you're more advanced athlete, but ultimately you need to be going high intensity, typically 85 to 95 percent of your maximal effort. And something I always have to highlight to athletes is it's 85 to 95 percent of your maximal effort given the domain.

Because if we go out to a track and I say, Hey, I need you to run as fast as you can. Well, That's gonna be very different given the distance that I give you, right? If I say 50 meters or a hundred meters as fast as you can, that's typically gonna be a hundred percent maximal effort. Speed as fast as you could go.

But if I say, Hey, I want you to run a 400, that's gonna be different because if you take that same 100 meter sprint mentality to a 400 meter effort, you'll probably burn out most likely. And so. That is, that's what you have to keep in mind with when you're assigned a certain amount of work, it's like, okay, where am I at on the intensity gauge?

Cause I can't give a hundred percent effort or 95 percent effort for two minutes. So I might need to back down to this 85 percent effort. So 30 seconds to two minutes. Now, what, what is the rest duration? Recovery is longer than the work period. And commonly it's between one to three or one to five. So an example would be if you did like a 30 second, uh, workout work bout, uh, you'd rest.

90 to 150 seconds, and typically these are shorter in duration, right? So if it's like it kind of maxes out at two minutes. So if you did to the longest you could possibly possibly rest would be 10 minutes. Now that's a long, long rest. I'd only be doing that if I was doing something that's like. About as hard as I could possibly go.

But what you'll realize is when you're doing these, if you ever think one to three or one to five is too long of a rest, you're like, wow, I'm fully recovered. You probably didn't go hard enough. In all honesty. It's not, Oh, wow. You must be some sort of fitness. God, you're in the, you're in an amazing shape.

Advanced athletes hate. Glycolytic training, because it is so painful. They want as much rest as possible. And you also want that rest going back to my original point, because you want to be able to make sustainable and repeatable efforts. And if, if I have you do a 90 second all out effort, and I only give you 90 seconds of rest going back to one to one, as opposed to one to three or one to five, you're not going to be able to put out the same power output.

Assuming you actually put out your best ever in the first 90 second bout, and this is where people start to really mess up not only energy system training, but interval training in general, it's not giving the appropriate effort given the time domain, and then the biggest mistake is not giving enough rest.

A lot of people just like they rest, you know, you've heard of these like, um. Stories where track coaches and I ran track in high school. It's I'm aware of this as well. It's like, uh, well, we're gonna run the straights and walk the curves. It's like, what are we? Yeah, that's a that's a hard workout. But what are we trying to target?

You know, what are we trying to target with that? How slow should I walk, you know? And so when you time it out, sometimes these things work, but a lot of times they don't, depending on the energy system that you are trying to hit here. So ultimately, you're yeah. Want to train the glycolytic system only if you truly like.

Need to operate in this area, so I go back to, um, like if you are doing jujitsu is is a big one if you're an athlete of any kind, um, you know, I think that glycolytic system helps you a lot, but the funny thing about the glycolytic system is most people don't ever actually. Have to train this. It is completely optional and I don't think it should be optional.

I think that you should go into this pain cave. I think it builds mental toughness. I think it builds a level of fitness, the ability for your body to clear and utilize lactate. Like, I think it's really good for you overall. But if we're just talking about an average human on the side of the street, it's like, do you need to be training?

Uh, you know, The glycolytic system to to be a well rounded human. It's like not necessarily. Um, I think that it's, it's a good idea, but you can, if you just are doing a lot of oxidative training and you're doing a lot of strength training, that's going to get you 80, 90 percent of the where, where you need to be for typical life demands.

But if you're military law enforcement, first responder, you just want to be ready for anything. I really highly encourage the glycolytic system because this is also the biggest limiter. In emergency situations or when you really need your body, uh, to operate, you know, for tip, you know, longer than that 10 second sprint.

Like if you need to be, if you need to like run away from an animal or run and get your kid and they're, they're kind of far away or whatever, this is the energy system that needs to be trained. It's like your emergency energy system. And you will find out very quickly that it is not there. There's no adrenaline that's going to come to save you in that you will just gas out and whatever bad thing is happening will continue to happen because you didn't train this.

So for me, I think that it's absolutely something people should train. But in the daily rigors of life of sitting on our butts and like not having to do much, you absolutely don't have to train it, but I think it's really good for you. We don't train it very often. A garage gym athlete, you know, typically one to two times per month, just like we were talking about, depending on what the goal of that current cycle is.

And so it's really important and it's a really awesome energy system, but it's super, super painful. Very, very, very, very painful. I mean, it's like if I know I'm going into a glycolytic training day. I just like I I'm a little bit nervous and I've I rarely get nervous about any kind of fitness. I just know it's like this is gonna hurt.

This is gonna be painful and I don't really want to do it, but I'm gonna do it anyway. And it's that doing it anyway when you know it's gonna be that hard is what builds the mental side of you in training. But that's it for this one. For all of our athletes who do the glycolytic training, when it pops up, we really appreciate you.

Thanks for sticking around. And for anyone who wants to see this laid out in a month for them, programmed for them, just go to garagegymathlete. com. Sign up for a free trial. We would love to have you, but that's it for this one. Remember, if you don't kill comfort, comfort will kill you.