Hard to Kill Programming Methodology: Part 5 - Aerobic Endurance

Welcome back to the Garage Gym Athlete Podcast! In part five of the Hard to Kill Programming Methodology series, we’re shifting gears from the strength continuum to the endurance continuum, starting with aerobic endurance. This foundational component lays the groundwork for performance, longevity, and a well-rounded fitness journey.

What is Aerobic Endurance?

Aerobic endurance is the ability to sustain low to moderate intensity work for an extended period. It’s a critical part of building a strong fitness foundation and enhancing your ability to recover, tackle higher-intensity training, and reduce injury risks.

Aerobic endurance training primarily targets zone 2, or 60–70% of your maximum heart rate. This type of training helps:

• Improve cardiovascular health
• Enhance metabolic flexibility (switching efficiently between fat and glucose as fuel)
• Increase mitochondrial density
• Boost physical resilience and longevity

Why is Aerobic Endurance Important?

Think of aerobic endurance as the base of a pyramid—without it, the rest of your training cannot reach its full potential. It complements strength training by improving your ability to recover and handle the demands of higher-intensity sessions.

Aerobic endurance also supports:

• Injury prevention
• Improved fat utilization for energy
• Enhanced general physical preparedness (GPP)
• Long-term health benefits, such as better heart and lung function

How to Train Aerobic Endurance

You don’t need a complicated plan or endless hours to build your aerobic base. Here’s a straightforward guide to get started:

1. Find Your Zone 2:

   • Use 60–70% of your maximum heart rate.
   • Alternatively, calculate it using the MAF Method (180 minus your age).

2. Choose Your Modality:

   • Walking, rucking, running, rowing, cycling, or any activity that keeps you in zone 2.

3. Train Consistently:

   • Aim for 1–2 sessions per week.
   • Each session can last 30–90 minutes, depending on your fitness level and time availability.

4. Don’t Stress About Perfection:

   • Daily movement and staying active can contribute to your aerobic base. Set a step goal (e.g., 10,000–15,000 steps) to ensure you’re consistently moving throughout the day.

Why Zone 2 Training is Gaining Popularity

Zone 2 training has become a hot topic in the fitness world, but its benefits are far from new. It’s been shown to increase cardiovascular efficiency, improve fat metabolism, and support recovery. While some sources advocate for 6–7 hours of weekly zone 2 training, most people can see significant benefits with far less time commitment.

The Bigger Picture

Aerobic endurance is just one piece of the endurance continuum, which also includes muscular endurance, strength endurance, and power endurance. Each layer builds upon the other, ensuring a well-rounded and resilient athlete.

At Garage Gym Athlete, aerobic endurance isn’t just an afterthought. It’s seamlessly integrated into our programming, ensuring our athletes build a solid foundation while preparing for more intense challenges.

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Ready to see how aerobic endurance fits into a comprehensive training plan? Sign up for a free trial at Garage Gym Athlete and experience the Hard to Kill Programming Methodology firsthand.

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

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Podcast Transcript

Jerred: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the garage gym athlete podcast. I'm Jerred Moon and welcome to part five in our programming series. So if you're just getting with me on this one, we are five episodes deep into going over our hard to kill programming methodology, which is a balancing act that optimizes performance and longevity.

So being able to do a bunch of cool stuff while also living a long time, having the fitness, mobility, and resilience to live, A long, healthy life without the injury, without the, the back problems, all those kinds of things. That's ultimately what we're trying to balance in the hard to kill programming methodology.

And like I said, you're in the fifth episode, the first part, uh, first four parts, we went over the strength continuum, so strength, strength, speed, speed, strength, and speed. Now we are opening a new can of worms, another continuum, and that is the endurance continuum. So over the next four episodes, I'll be talking about endurance.

We'll kick it off today with aerobic endurance. Then we'll go to muscular endurance, strength, endurance. And then lastly, finish out the continuum and power endurance. Now, what you have to know is like, this is not some scientific method. I did not pull this from a textbook. This is actual like, Hey, here's what we've done over the years there.

Here's the method that we've developed. This is a very unique training methodology. That's specific to us. We created it. This is what you can expect at garage gym athlete. And so a lot of these things can overlap strength, strength, speed can overlap, aerobic endurance, muscular endurance, strength, and are these things can overlap, but I like to break them out in individual components because it makes sure that we're making really well rounded athletes.

And another reason I like to go through these continuums is because if I say that there's a continuum, what I'm basically saying is that there are prerequisites. So if you go back through the strength episodes, you wouldn't train speed, which is the fourth element. Four deep into the continuum without having trained strength, strength, speed, and speed strength first.

It's so there are prerequisites and that's the same when we get into the endurance continuum, there's power endurance is at the end of this. You wouldn't want to go train power endurance. If you don't have some strength endurance and then a base of muscular endurance, and then some aerobic endurance, if you don't have just endurance in general.

So these continuums. Think of them in your head as like, Hey, prerequisites, you need to go through these in order for the best possible results. And I, this is the last continuum. I'm not, I'm not just throwing all these continuums at you, but if you just want to file it away in your brain in a very simple way, it's like, Hey, the first strength continuum had four components.

The next. Uh, endurance continuum has four components. That's eight deep and we're only going into 13. So, and we're hitting two main areas, strength and endurance. We're just breaking them out way more refined than people typically do. So what am I talking about? Aerobic endurance? Well, endurance, aerobic endurance, the aerobic system is so important.

In fact, In the 13 different areas that we train, three of them are endurance aerobic endurance based. So today I'll talk about aerobic endurance later. We'll talk about, uh, the oxidative training, which is more how we apply interval training to building a higher aerobic base, maybe more threshold based training, and then we'll talk about.

And then we'll talk about mixed modal aerobic, which is where you're kind of doing like a circuit or like grunt work. Like think about carrying a sandbag and then doing some jump rope and some pushups or some pull ups, then having a little bit of rest and then doing that on repeat for 40, 60 minutes, that's mixed modal aerobic, but today I'm talking about.

Aerobic endurance as just a base layer to your training. I'm not talking about threshold, uh, any upper end zone training, really this, the predominantly is going to be zone two training. That's what we're talking about. When we're talking about this base layer, when I talked about strength and the strength continuum, I talked about how just base strength is it's the base of the pyramid, right?

Like if you want to be really fast or powerful. Yeah. You have to have a very strong base. The, the wider, the peer, the wider, the base of the pyramid, the taller it can be in strength training, you do that by just having really good foundational strength through either hypertrophy training or like powerlifting, just like getting stronger, right?

And the same is true in the endurance continuum. So the, the base of the pyramid here is just straight up aerobic endurance, and we can build that through zone two training. So zone two training, I have done a lot of information on. So like, if this is something you want to nerd out on or geek out on, it's also gained a lot of popularity.

So you could find other resources that aren't just my podcast or the garage mouthy podcast, but if you search our feed, we've done so much. And we've talked about zone two so much, I'm not going to be able to condense it all down into, you know, one 10 minute episode like I'm doing right now. So if you really want to geek out on it from how we've, uh, you know, tested our blood lactate to get it into most accurate zone two, we've had, we've done those things.

We've talked about a lot of the science behind zone two, how to burn fat and like why that matters and how that's important. It's different than like weight loss, like just so many facets of this, but it's really not complicated. And, you know, it's gained a lot of popularity over the last couple of years.

We've been talking about it for, you know, like a decade, ultimately all you need to know is zone two training is just the base. It's just laying the base for everything else that you want to do. So as we want to build muscular endurance, strength, endurance, power, endurance, and this continue continuum, you're not going to be able to do that with a massive, uh, Aerobic endurance base, and I don't need to sit here and go through all of the science with you on aerobic endurance.

Like we know it helps you reduce injury injuries. It makes you more versatile. It's going to enhance your physical resilience and performance. And like it has a broad application across multiple domains. Like just no aerobic endurance specifically zone two is ultimately. It's like the king, right? It's like, uh, you know, along with strength training, like it's the king of everything else.

It's just a low to moderate intensity work that helps you live longer. It's going to give you better cardiovascular function. It increased stroke volume and a higher mitochondrial density. Just so many different things. So how do you train zone two? Well, if you're not doing the blood lactate method, like you can go see in our other podcasts, you're just going to be shooting for 60 to 70 percent of your maximum heart rate.

Also a big fan of the math method, um, so, which is maximal aerobic, uh, function. It was coined by Phil Maffetone, who's a famous endurance athlete, and he just does 180 minus your age. And there, again, even that there are some, uh, Uh, you know, levels of complexity and nuance to that. But the base of that is, is pretty solid for finding out your heart rate, where you should train.

So one 80 minus your age is another great indicator there. And so that's where you're going to want to be, how you execute this. It doesn't really matter. Like if you can maintain that heart rate in longer runs, walks, rucks, biking, rowing, skier, it doesn't really matter. However you want to do it. You're going to get that aerobic base and you will find out.

The more you do this type of type of training, you will really, you'll realize like, wow, I recover faster. I'm able to tackle harder training. It's really the base of general physical preparedness. So it lays the groundwork for higher intensity training in the future. And that's the main reason we want to do it.

Yes. There's a lot of science and studies and talk out there these days about how. Zone two training and like going back to that mitochondrial density, how it's going to help you live longer and all these things, but I really feel like Feel like the pendulum has, has swung too far. And this is typically what happens in the health and fitness spaces.

Uh, you know, people, uh, you know, everything's like a race to put out information. And so when we first started talking about zone two training as base, the pendulum was like way over to the left. No one really cared. And then everyone found out about it, um, cause it became so popular that it swung all the way to the right to where people were like, Oh yeah, you got to train six to seven hours of zone two per week.

And that's the only way you're going to see any benefits. And it's like, people don't even train six to seven hours per week. So what I want to tell you is you don't need to worry about it that much. Just get some low base aerobic training in. So this can be. Uh, once a week, you can throw it in, uh, you know, 30, 45 minutes, 60 minutes, 90 minutes.

Typically you'll be able to handle that heart rate zone. That's 60 to 70 percent or a one 80 minus your age. Like you'll be able to handle that for a really long time. And so it's up to you how much time you have, but I like lower intensity stuff. I really enjoy like a ruck. These are the best ways to do it.

But the reason I tell people not to stress out about it is because there's this other major factor called life that is predominantly spent in zone one and zone two. And so as long, if you are putting in a lot of movement throughout your day, my personal belief is that you are getting plenty of this aerobic base that I'm talking about, not just by.

Sitting around and doing nothing. I'm saying if you have a lot of movement throughout your day or you're active, you are getting a lot of this. And I don't think it has to be at a specific heart rate, you know, perfectly all the time. I think if you can just get more movement throughout your day, if you actually track your steps and you're like, Hey, I want to get 15, 000 steps, 20, 000 steps, or 10, 000 steps, whatever the goal is for you.

You're going to be checking the box here, then also training it once a week, maybe twice a week, where you are going specific to that heart rate, it's 30, 30 to 60 minutes, maybe up to 90 minutes if you have the time and you will be light years ahead of everyone else. And that's the main thing that you need to, to, to think about when you're thinking about this aerobic endurance training, it's really just.

It enhances the, uh, the, uh, the body's ability to use fat as a fuel, which is crucial for endurance. So it's going to make you better, like on, uh, you know, that metabolic flexibility side of being able to switch between fuels, between glucose and between fat, like it's going to help mitochondria, but also it just gives you that base, like going back to why we actually care about, it gives you that base to be able to tackle harder training.

And it's absolutely. Super, super important, but also super simple. I've already kind of tackled how you should go about it and why it matters. Um, I'm going to get way more in the weeds in the next couple episodes. When we get, we talk about muscular endurance, strength, endurance, and power endurance. But aerobic endurance, I kept this one really high level.

Cause it's not complex. I think people overcomplicate how to improve aerobic endurance, get a lot of movement throughout your day, set of steps, step goal and achieve it. And then one to two times per week hit that 60 to 70 percent of your max heart rate or 180 minus your age, whichever method you want to calculate and target that, like I said, one to two times a week in whatever modality that you want, whether that is rucking.

Rowing, you know, running, it doesn't matter. However, you can just kind of stay in that heart rate zone and be there for a decent amount of time. I think you will have this box checked and it's also, you know, we're going to hit the aerobic system. Like I said, two other ways after this, within this series.

So not a super challenging one to cover here. And to be honest, I don't really need to sell anybody on the purpose or why you should be training aerobic endurance. It is very, very important to your training overall. But that's it for this one for all of my garage gym athletes out there following along in the series.

I'd really appreciate the feedback. Thank you so much for listening. And you're just getting a little bit more behind the scenes of how we program our unique method here at garage gym athlete for anybody who wants to figure out how to get the strength continuum, the entire endurance continuum. Once we get to energy systems and the mixed modal training and how we hit all 13 areas of these every single month in our hard to kill track at garage, gym, athlete, just go to garage, gym, athlete.

com. You, I, I I'm going to break down the whole system. You can sit around and program it yourself, but there's a lot of nuance. I'd rather just do it for you. So if you just go to garage, gym, athlete. com, sign up for a trial, free trial. You can see how all of this works. In a very realistic day to day setting with our programming, that's it for this one.

Remember, if you don't kill comfort, comfort will kill you.