Hard to Kill Programming Methodology: Part 6 - Muscular Endurance

Welcome back to the Garage Gym Athlete Podcast! In this episode, Jerred Moon dives deep into muscular endurance—what it is, why it matters, and, most importantly, how to train it effectively. If you’re looking to build stamina, increase your reps, and lay the foundation for functional strength, this guide is for you.

What is Muscular Endurance?

Muscular endurance is the ability of a muscle or group of muscles to perform repeated contractions over a period of time without fatiguing. Think push-ups, air squats, or sit-ups. It’s not about maxing out on heavy lifts; it’s about sustaining effort through high reps and longer durations.

This foundational skill benefits:

• Everyday activities like carrying groceries or climbing stairs.
• Functional tasks like lifting, pushing, or pulling.
• Advanced strength and power training by prepping stabilizers and connective tissues.

The Case for Muscular Endurance Training

Muscular endurance isn’t just for athletes; it’s essential for anyone looking to improve physical resilience and overall fitness. Whether you’re aiming to crush a military PT test, keep up with your kids, or handle repetitive manual tasks, improving muscular endurance is a game changer.

Bodyweight exercises are a practical and versatile way to build muscular endurance. With minimal equipment required, you can train anywhere—hotel rooms, home gyms, or even outdoors. As Jared says, “If you have a floor, you can work out!”

How to Train Muscular Endurance: The One Man System

Jared’s One Man System has delivered outstanding results for military personnel, athletes, and even kids. Here’s the exact method:

Step 1: Test Your Baseline

Perform a one-minute max test for:

• Push-ups
• Pull-ups
• Sit-ups
• Air squats

Record your reps for each movement. These numbers will guide your training percentages.

Step 2: Train with the Three Pillars

Use these three components to build endurance:

1. Control Work

   • Do 20% of your one-minute max in a slow, controlled manner.
   • Example: If your push-up max is 50, perform 10 slow push-ups.

2. Volume Work

   • Perform 50% of your one-minute max at a normal pace.
   • Example: For 50 push-ups, complete 25 reps.

3. Dynamic Work

   • Complete 15% of your max with explosive movements.
   • Example: Perform 8 clapping push-ups or plate push-ups.

Step 3: Cycle Through Exercises

Apply the above structure to all four movements:

1. Push-ups
2. Sit-ups
3. Pull-ups
4. Air squats

Start with one round of each category (Control, Volume, Dynamic), then progress to 2-5 rounds as you build endurance.

Why This Method Works

The One Man System targets muscular endurance by:

• Strengthening stabilizers and connective tissues.
• Teaching muscles to resist fatigue during repeated contractions.
• Progressively increasing your capacity in practical, functional movements.

Jared’s methodology isn’t just theory; it’s been tested with military personnel and athletes, delivering rapid improvements in PT test scores and functional fitness.

Start Today

You don’t need fancy equipment to improve muscular endurance. A floor, some determination, and this proven strategy are all you need. If you’re serious about leveling up, give the One Man System a try—or let Garage Gym Athlete do the programming for you. Sign up for a free trial at Garage Gym Athlete to experience the full Hard to Kill programming methodology.

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 back to the garage gym athlete podcast, where we are in the middle of a series. If you want to go back into the series, going over hard to kill programming methodology so far, we've covered the entire strength continuum. I started the endurance continuum. We hit aerobic endurance today.

It's muscular endurance. And I'm going to get right to it. Like, I want to tell you exactly how to improve your muscular endurance and why it matters. So for the first part of this episode, I will talk a little bit about just like muscular endurance, you know, in general terms, but like, that's something you can Google, right?

Like I, I just want to help you understand it if you're listening to this episode. But ultimately what I want to end with, or the back half of the episode even though these are short episodes is I want you to understand exactly how I've seen progress. With improving muscular endurance for athletes, because it's something that I have spent a lot of time on because I trained so many people in the military and have trained so many people with military backgrounds and something that they predominantly need is muscular endurance improvement.

And a lot of this has to do with their improvement on their PT test across all disciplines. All branches, there's a ton of muscular endurance that is tested. And so that is something I've spent a lot of time on and I've helped. And I, I have a very practical solution down to like exactly how you can do this that I'm going to end this episode with, but like, let's just talk.

Muscular endurance, big picture. So like I said, endurance, we cover the strength continuum and now we're the endurance continuum. Last last episode you know, I talked about aerobic endurance and how you can train that gave you a lot of practical application for zone two training and how you should do that now, moving down to the continuum next up is muscular endurance, right?

And with muscular endurance, it's pretty easy. Like it's pretty simple to understand, right? So muscular endurance is just, it's the ability to sustain low to moderate lows for higher reps and longer durations. That's it. Like if you're a bill, if you're able to do more reps with less fatigue in the same set, you are improving your muscular endurance.

And I really like to think about muscular endurance predominantly. In more body weight style. Like that's how I think about it. Cause next we'll hit strength, endurance, and power endurance. And that's where we start getting a lot more implements involved with kettlebells, barbells, those kinds of things.

And so when you break it out, how I break it out, how we break it out for the hard to kill programming methodology, you get way more targeted with your goal. So we're predominantly, when I'm talking about muscular endurance, there is some overlap into strength, endurance, and things that can happen with the barbell and kettlebell, but I am talking about specifically.

You know, a lot more body weight based, being able to do lots and lots of pushups, lots instead of sit ups, air squats, those kinds of things without, you know, Accumulating so much fatigue that you're unable to continue on. Like the whole purpose of the training is local muscular fatigue resistance. It teaches your muscles to handle repeated contractions without the early fatigue.

Like that's why we train it. It's super functional for everyday life. I mean, if you think about it, if you can repeat it, anything that's repeated, like lifting, carrying, pushing, pulling, anything, yard work, those kinds of things, it's going to involve muscular endurance. And it's another foundation, a lot like aerobic and strength, It's a, it's a big foundation for higher load training.

So before jumping into heavy strength work, ensuring that smaller stabilizers and connective tissues can handle the volume is very important. Also, if you have kids. I think that training muscular endurance through calisthenics, bodyweight training is the base. It's where you should start. A lot of dudes, a lot of dads I see out there, they want to start with a barbell.

I couldn't disagree more. You got to start with a broomstick and bodyweight. Like those are the two Bs that you should be hitting, not the barbell. So ultimately muscular endurance is incredibly practical, just like the daily utility of it. Climbing stairs, carrying groceries, doing repetitive manual labor.

Without getting smoked, all of those things, super important. And it is very easy to implement with pushups, squats, lunges. I mean, there's never a reason that you can't work out, right? Like you, if you master how to program muscular endurance, like you, you can't be like, ah, there's no gym here. It's like you are in a hotel room and you have a floor.

Okay, cool. You got a floor that you can stand on. That's like a hundred percent of the time you have a floor that you can stand on. You can do some pushups, some sit ups, some squats, so on and so forth. And it's, it's really Really super important to that laying the space, but let's get into the actual how to program it.

Cause this is what I wanted to talk about. And this is a big goal of the series overall. I hope everyone understands that it's not just like teaching you like, Oh, this is what muscular endurance is. I go over that the first half of the episode, because I want you to understand it. At least that like a base definition, what it is every episode.

So far in the series, I'm telling you how to do it. Like in a strength, I'm telling you sets reps, percentages of what you should be tackling, how to move through it, how to execute it. And I did the same thing in aerobic endurance. I'm gonna do same thing in every episode. Now we get to muscular endurance.

Let's talk about exactly how you can do this. Because to be honest, when I set out on this path years and years ago, it's like, how do I improve somebody's pushups? It's like, Oh, do more pushups. I'm like, that's not good enough for me. That's not a, it's not a program. Like it doesn't. I just do pushups today and then more pushups tomorrow.

It doesn't make sense. So here's the deal. I created a program called the one man system and a lot of our athletes have used it. I'm going to break down basically the programming methodology that we have found because. In three and four week waves with the one man system, I've been able to add so many pushups to how many, somebody, how many total pushups somebody can do.

Max pushups, max, max sit ups, max pull ups, max air squats. So many in very short periods, periods of time, talking like three to four weeks. And then if you compound, you do eight weeks, 16 weeks, whatever, you'll just be an animal at this stuff. Like you, it will not be difficult for you to do. You know, 50, 60, 70 pushups in a minute.

These are the kinds of results that we have seen over and over again, following this method. So here's how you do it. I'm just going to break down the exact programming methodology of this program, and you could implement it right away. So look. A lot of the military has timed PT tests. So how many pushups can you do in a minute or two minutes or whatever?

Depends on the branch of the service, but how I broke it down was one minute, because it's pretty standard for most people. They can actually put that out for a full minute. So if you wanted to do this program or try to increase your muscular endurance following our methodology, what you're going to do is you're going to test yourself.

You can do this today. You do one minute of maximum pushups. How many pushups can you do in one minute? Then you're going to do how many pull ups can you do in one minute? How many sit ups can you do in one minute? And how many air squats can you do in one minute? And you're going to test. You're going to write down your baselines.

Okay? So you got a baseline for all four of these exercises because those, and you can pick different exercises if you want, but those are just four very core base movements, right? So a minute of each one of those. Now breaking it down into further, it's like, okay, what do I do from there? You're going to do three different things.

You're going to do control work, volume work, and dynamic work. And I'm going to go over this quickly. Okay. So control is going to be 20 percent of your one rep max. Of your, sorry, of your 60 second max. So bad habit there. Ultimately example, if you could do 50 pushups in one minute, 20 percent of that would be 10.

Okay. So 10, and you're going to do this in the control fashion. What do I mean by control? I mean, slow and controlled, slow on the way down. Slow on the way up for 10 repetitions control. Then you're going to go to volume. So volume, you're going to do 50%. So sticking with my example, if I could do 50 pushups in a minute, I'm going to do 25.

I'm just going to crank out 25 pushups. Okay. That's the, the, the volume. And then we get to dynamic where you're only going to do 15%. So if, again, you did 50 pushups in a minute, 15 percent of those reps, Okay. Of that rep range would be eight total reps and dynamic would be clapping pushups or plate pushups where you push yourself up and you land your hands on a plate that are a couple inches off the ground.

This would involve you putting like a 45 pound plate on the left, on your left side of your hand and the right side of your hand and like jumping up to that. You, so exploding up, jumping up at the plate, plate pushups, and that's what you're going to do. That's the programming. And what you do is you do that for every single thing.

So you do pushup control. Sit up control, pull up control, squat control, all the same. 20 reps of your 20 percent of your one minute max. And then you're going to do go through volume pushups, 50 percent sit ups, 50 percent pull ups, 50 percent squats, 50%, and then you're going to do dynamic. So pushups. 15 percent sit up, 15 percent pull ups, 15 percent squats, 15%.

And that's exactly how you're going to run through this. You can start with running through all of that. So it's all of that one time. Then you can go through all of it. Two times, three times. Like when I do this, it typically takes me about 10 minutes to do push up, sit up, pull up, squat, push up, sit up, pull up, squat, push up, sit up, pull up, squat for all the controls, all the volumes, all the dynamics.

It takes me about 10 minutes to go through all of that. And so. 10 minutes is not the full workout. So you can go through that two, three, four, no more than probably five times that, that I would go through that. So that's ultimately how you're going to work through that. That is the program. That is the best way I've ever seen muscular endurance programs.

And I'm not just saying that because I programmed it. I've just never seen anybody tried to make this into a formula. You know, all of these like body weight programs out there and people trying to improve muscular endurance. It's just so all over the place. They're like, You know, there's, they're trying to train so many different things, but it's like the goal.

I'm not trying to do the human flag, right? Like that's different. That's gymnastics training. There's a lot of isometrics. We're not training isometrics over here. That's a different part of the program. What we're training specifically is just muscular endurance, muscular endurance, not isometric contractions.

We do take that into account. That's later. It's later in the programming series. So anyway, if you want to just be a beast at muscular endurance, you know, Do exactly what I said. Re listen to this episode. You know, I explained the whole programming methodology. But like I have seen phenomenal results and I'm talking about hundreds, if not thousands and thousands of military athletes I've programmed for.

And people who were directly under me, who I helped improve on these PT tests, they improved drastically and quickly following this methodology. That way, what that's like when I want to improve muscular endurance, this is exactly what I do, because I think it is the most powerful way to improve muscular endurance in a short amount of time.

And it's also super important. You know, I did a podcast months ago where I talked about the improvement my kids saw following this kind of program and it was insanity. Insanity, the amount that they saw over the course of the summer. So if you really want to improve your muscular endurance, go through this methodology or hey, there's another option.

Go to garagegymathlete. com, sign up for a free trial and you can just experience how we program all of these things and let us do the work for you. For all of our athletes already doing that, we appreciate you so much, but that's it for this one. Remember if you don't kill comfort, comfort will kill you.