Hard to Kill Programming Methodology: Part 8 - Power Endurance

What is Power Endurance?

Welcome back to the Garage Gym Athlete Podcast and the Hard to Kill Programming Methodology series! We’ve covered the strength continuum and endurance continuum, and today we’re wrapping up endurance training with Power Endurance—a crucial yet often overlooked component of elite fitness.

Power Endurance is the ability to sustain explosive movements over time. It’s not just about lifting heavy or being fast—it’s about maintaining high-intensity output repeatedly. If you want to perform at your peak in real-world situations, competitive sports, or tactical professions, Power Endurance is what separates the good from the great.

Why Power Endurance Matters

💪 Explosive Strength Over Time – Think of kettlebell swings, snatches, plyometrics, and repeated sprints—anything that requires quick bursts of power again and again.

🔥 Essential for Tactical Athletes & High-Performance Sports – If you’re in MMA, basketball, soccer, CrossFit, or the military, you need power endurance to dominate.

🏃 Bridges the Gap Between Strength & Endurance – Strength alone isn’t enough. Power endurance ensures you maintain explosive force without fading.

😈 Most Athletes Avoid It—Which is Why It Makes You a Beast – Power endurance training is brutal. That’s why few people train it properly—but if you do, it gives you a serious advantage.

How to Train Power Endurance

Unlike strength training, power endurance is NOT about max lifts. Instead, it's about sustained explosive movements under fatigue.

✅ The Best Methods for Power Endurance Training

1. Heavy Kettlebell Swings – High-rep swings at a challenging weight (e.g., 50 swings at 50 lbs, 70 swings at 70 lbs).
2. Kettlebell Snatch Test – Max reps in 3-5 minutes, alternating arms.
3. 500-Meter Row Sprint – All-out effort; measures power output over time.
4. Repeated Sprints – Short bursts with minimal rest.
5. Plyometric Circuits – Jump squats, burpees, box jumps at max effort for time.

Sample Power Endurance Workout

🏋️‍♂️ 3 Rounds:
🔹 15 Heavy Kettlebell Swings (Choose a weight that challenges you)
🔹 10 Kettlebell Snatches per Arm
🔹 20 Box Jumps
🔹 30-Second Sprint
🔹 Rest 1 Minute & Repeat

💥 Focus on explosiveness with controlled fatigue. This workout will burn, but it will also build elite-level stamina and power.

Who Should Train Power Endurance?

✔ Athletes looking for an edge in sports & performance
✔ Military, first responders, and tactical professionals
✔ Garage Gym Athletes who want to be truly Hard to Kill
✔ Anyone who wants to push past plateaus and build unstoppable endurance

Final Thoughts: Why You Should Train Power Endurance

If you can train power endurance, you eliminate weaknesses in your fitness. You won’t gas out in a fight, a competition, or real-world scenarios. It’s what separates good athletes from absolute beasts.

If you want programming that incorporates all of these elements, join us at Garage Gym Athlete. We do the hard work of programming for you so you can just show up and train.

🚀 Sign up for a FREE TRIAL at garagegymathlete.com and start building elite-level power endurance today!

💡 And remember—if you don’t kill comfort, comfort will kill you.

Garage Gym Athlete Workout of the Week

Podcast Transcript

Jerred: Alright, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Garage Gym Athlete Podcast. We are continuing our series on programming. This is the eighth episode. This is Power Endurance today. So if you're new to the series, uh, you know, just catch you up real quick. We're going over the hard to kill programming methodology.

It's the method and methods we use in Garage Gym Athlete programming. Truly what makes us unique. And this hard to kill methodology is a blend of longevity training and also performance. So it's kind of hitting on both. So ultimately you can live a long time and do a lot of cool stuff in the process.

And today we're talking about power endurance. And this will close out the endurance continuum, so I went over the strength continuum, was the first four episodes, strength, strength, speed, speed, strength, and speed, you can go back and listen to any of those, and now we're in the endurance continuum, so I've gone over aerobic endurance, muscular endurance, strength endurance, and today I'm talking about power endurance, and just a quick reminder, they're not all continuums, this is the final continuum in the eighth episode here, but a continuum typically means And Prerequisite.

It just means that you, you should build up other things before you go to the next. So this has been in order on purpose. We did aerobic endurance, muscular endurance, strength, endurance, and now we're rounding out with power endurance and I want everybody to know kind of up front the prerequisite to training power endurance is having a lot of strength endurance, muscular endurance, and aerobic endurance, and even having that strength background through the strength continuum.

Power endurance is one of those areas where I would even go so far as to say It's an optional training methodology. I mean, in reality, everything's optional, right? You don't have to train every single modality. You don't have to train every area. But if you are interested in our type of training, you want to be really well rounded.

Then you want to train as much as you can. But power endurance is a crazy one. And I'm going to start this one off with a story because I think it better illustrates than me just, you know, kind of explaining power endurance to you. But I'll never forget when I was in the Air Force, I got assigned to To the two, four special operations wing.

And I was the new guy. And when I showed up, you know, I was checking in everything. And obviously within special operations, there's like a huge fitness component to that. And, uh, you know, I was, I was part of the leadership staff and they were, they were like, Ooh, you know, here's, here's the new guy we're going to be.

P. T. is tomorrow morning, zero five hundred, like whatever, it's, it's gonna be rough, and we're gonna be a hundred percent focused on you, and then, you know, everybody let me know, like, hey, tomorrow's your first day, they're gonna, it's gonna be tough, like, they're gonna really, they're gonna really run you through the ringer.

From a fitness standpoint and then that was just kind of the the running joke they try to make you nervous about it all day like, you know, it's just part of the the culture, you know, they were just like, oh, tomorrow is going to be rough for you, Captain, you know, like just all this stuff. And then I'll never forget like I was sitting there thinking like.

I've been training a lot up to this point, like, constantly, twice a day, for years, like, once a day, you know, hard training, like, I've just been doing, like, all, all sorts of training, and so, I actually started to get a little bit nervous, and then, it just, like, occurred to me at some point, I was like, like, what, what are they gonna do?

Like, What, what, what can even happen from a fitness standpoint that would be hard for me? And I just kind of started to look, you know, I hadn't developed this methodology, but I'd been doing a lot of this type of training. I just hadn't put, um, you know, frameworks to it. And I was like, like, what could they possibly do?

I'm like, are they gonna have me run a long time? I was like, I'm not really scared of that. Like, they're probably not gonna have me lift weight. I'm probably stronger than, than most of these guys. I'm like You know, like, what is that? Like, is that we're gonna go really high intensity for a short duration.

There just was nothing that I was afraid of. And then once I kind of realized that I was like, what are they gonna do? Like, I, I do worse things to myself than anyone is going to be able to do to me. And then I just wasn't yeah. Nervous anymore. And when I showed up the next day for that training session, I was right.

Like they put me through a really hard session, but I was like this, there's nothing that can happen to me on the fitness side that like there, there's no hole, right? There was no hole in my fitness. And after that, it gave me so much confidence because I'm not trying to sound arrogant, but I had trained in such a well rounded way intentionally.

That there was no, like, me showing up and you finding my weakness. Now, not that I was, like, the fittest guy in the world, you could definitely, like, there were fitter people who could, like, do more, do better, do faster, you know, whatever, do harder, but, like, there was nothing that was gonna be exposed, and Where that's different for a lot of athletes is like if you bring an endurance athlete to something that has power endurance or strength or whatever, they're going to quickly, you'll find, uh, you know, the holes in their armor, or if you find you bring a really strong athlete to the table and then you find out, oh, wow, they can't run a mile or they can't do a pull up like you find all these things.

But I didn't have any gaping holes like that in my fitness. And that just helped me very quickly realize Hey, I'm incredibly well rounded, and one of the things they had me do, uh, was very much a power endurance test, and to this day, I have not repeated it, but it was one of the hardest things that I have done, um, it was, it just, it hurt so bad, like, it hurt so bad, and it's not even that crazy, but It was 75, swings at 70 or 70 pounds.

70 swings at 70 pounds. So two poo kettlebell, which is like 72. So yeah, 72 swings. Uh, I believe that's two poo. So the, the Russian measurement for weight, they had me do 72 swings at 72 pounds unbroken. And it, that, that, I mean, if you just think about that for a minute. That's incredibly hard. So, you can go try this with any kettlebell you want.

You could try a 25 pound kettlebell for 25 reps, a 35 for 35 reps, 53 for 53 reps, but a 72 pound kettlebell for 72 reps unbroken, um, was very challenging, and I'll never forget, like, You know, you're like, you have run out of oxygen, your muscles are burning, everything hurts, your forearms are burning from the grip, like your legs are burning, everything is just burning, but I had trained power endurance, and that's ultimately what that was, so while it did hurt, and it was super painful, it wasn't, I didn't quit, and I think that's what they wanted, you know, I didn't give up, so ultimately, power endurance You know, I illustrated through a story today, as opposed to telling you exactly what it is.

But if I had to break it down, it exact it is exactly that it's explosive moves for the long haul. Like, so think about anything that's explosive, whether that's a kettlebell snatch, whether that's a kettlebell swing, whether that is, you know, an Olympic lift or jumping plyometrics, anything that is power based, meaning you move fast explosively, you're able to do that for long periods of time repeated.

And I think This is my personal opinion. If you have a high level of power endurance, it's hard to get get that, but if you do, this is what makes you a beast, like it's just because no one else touches it. There are two things that people don't like to train, and that's ultimately the lactic side of training, the glycolytic side of training, which is very similar to power endurance.

People don't like To go two minutes all out highest hardest intensity. So a lot of people don't train that. Same with empower endurance because it kind of goes into that glycolytic frame. But at the same time, people don't want to train. It's very hard. It's very difficult. But if you can and you do achieve these things, you are just an absolute beast.

Power endurance, being able to do a lot of kettlebell swings, a lot of explosive stuff for repeated efforts. Now I mentioned strength endurance makes you athletic. This is what makes you a beast. So If you have that strength endurance base, you're going to be incredibly athletic and maintain that athleticism.

And this is just going to actually make you good at those. Anything that has repeated explosive demands, whether that's basketball, sprints, jumps, soccer, MMA, like MMA, if you're doing Brazilian jujitsu, anything like that, you know, power endurance is, is huge. And a lot of people overlook, um, how important or how Amazing.

It could be for sports like that. And I know a lot of people are into, um, you know, doing those kind of that kind of training these days. So it is awesome. There are a lot of benefits if you want to be able to do like anything athletic, um, or anything short distance sprints. Um, and really, like I said, just be a beast.

Power endurance is everything. So what are some ways that we can like really get into it? Well, like I said, you need to make sure that you are Yeah. You, you have that base of aerobic muscular and strength endurance is built before you get into it. But then after you started training it, it's not that hard to train and there's not a lot of, um, like percentage of one rep max or anything like that.

What you need to do, I think the best way to train it without getting like, I'm just going to how to train it. The best way to train it is with a kettlebell in my opinion. And the reason being is because it's safer than doing a lot of the things that you have with a barbell. Like, I'm not gonna recommend people do 30, 50 snatches, uh, with a, with a barbell.

CrossFit used to try and do that kind of stuff. I just don't think it's good. It's a very technical movement. Hard to do repeated for long duration. So I don't actually recommend doing this with a barbell. I, I recommend doing it with a kettlebell. But then what you need to do with a kettlebell is you need to increase the weight.

And so I can't give you an exact weight, cause power endurance doesn't necessarily work with, like, percentage of one rep max. But you have to know that it has to be Heavy has to be something that's going to challenge you. And so there are two great ways to do this with a kettlebell. And the first one is, is in my example.

So doing high rep, heavy kettlebell swings, you don't have to start with 50 reps at 50 or 70 reps at 70 working up doing like, if you're good to, if like a heavy swing for you is 50 pounds, then doing sets of 10 or 15. And you'll feel it. You'll feel when you're starting to get into that power endurance, you know, when all the, uh, all your muscles like are starting to burn when you're going through it, like, you know, you're starting to train power endurance and then just doing these things and adding them to your training.

So that's the first way kettlebell swings the other way. And this is something we use in our EO3 fit test is the kettlebell snatch test. There's a five minute version. We do a three minute version. So as many kettlebell snatches as you can do in three minutes and you alternate arms, uh, every single time.

And so if you really want to test your power endurance, I don't know if there's a better way. I recommend most people starting with a three minute. And not the five minute. Um, and then just seeing how far you get and then benchmarking and trying to get better and better at that. But if you don't stop and you just push yourself to keep going and keep going and keep going, that'll be one of the hardest tests that you've ever created or you've ever completed another way to assess power endurance in my mind.

Um, is if you really want to assess your power, you can do something like a 500 meter. Row for time. So all out as hard as you can row, um, 500, 500 meters, because what this does is it like, It's in that time domain where you can still be in power endurance without having to go too deep into, um, you know, aerobic conditioning or anything like that, or glycolytic.

But ultimately what you can do with a 500 meter row for time is you actually get to assess your power output because a lot of times when it's that short duration, people aren't running into an issue where they're. Fatiguing, you know, aerobically, they're typically they're not strong enough to go any faster.

So these are all great benchmarks to test. So testing the kettlebell snatch test, testing the 500 meter row. These are great power endurance tests and then training it. I, I think training it almost exclusively with a barbell is fine. Plyometrics is okay. Again, doing too many of those things or doing them incorrectly can lead to injury.

Too much with a barbell can lead to injury. So if we're looking to train power endurance, which is, you know, it's really good for you, but ultimately comes with some risk. Um, I think the safest way to do it is with a kettlebell. And I think that's ultimately how you should focus on it. And like I said, if you can do power endurance, if that is checked, that's in your wheelhouse, there's not much that can happen to you in the performance or fitness space, that's going to scare you, you know, you're capable of pretty much anything and ready to go for pretty much anything.

If you're training this modality. That's it for this one. And that concludes and wraps up our aerobic, our endurance continuum, going over aerobic muscular strength and power endurance. We'll get into energy system training next, and I'm really looking forward to it because that is some of the most popular topics that, uh, when we discuss them, they're very popular amongst our athletes.

So if you are one of our athletes, I appreciate you sticking around, listening to the podcast, doing the training. And if you want to be a part of what we're doing, go to Garage Gym Athlete. Sign up for a free trial and we would love to have you. Remember, if you don't kill comfort, comfort will kill you.