Calf Training at its BEST!

Calves you want them everyone has them, now is your chance to learn some new calf building secrets

I am going to be straight with you guys first and foremost calves are genetic! With that being said take the picture above for example. The guy on the far rights (my boy Erik "the house") calves look much different then the guy on the far left ( Ben). This is due to genetic make up of the muscle bellies and insertions of those muscles. This is not to say they came out the womb with calves looking like this! I am here to tell you with the right type of training we can get you bigger calves!

I want to take a look at the anatomy of the calves for a minute so we can get a better understanding of what all the calves do and how they are made up.

As you can see and I'm sure a lot of you know there are 2 muscle that make up the calves. The Gastrocnemius and soleus. As you can see from the picture above the Gastroc is the bigger more meaty of the two and an important fact of the gastroc is that it crosses the knee joint. Why is this so important? Well this means anytime you are doing an exercise where the knee is extended we are going to be using more of the Grastroc. And anytime the knee joint is closed off we isolate the soleus. Now after knowing this we can tell right away we need to be doing different angles and styles of calf raises. 

Both of the muscles come together to form the Achilles Tendon and the Achilles attaches to the calcaneus bone. The muscle allow the plantar flex which is simply point your toe down, raising up on toes. The primary functions of these muscle are Walking, running, jumping, sprinting.

Now that we know a little about how those muscles work we can understand how to train them. We know that raising up on the toes causes the calves to work. This means even walking causes the calves to work. Well how many steps do you take daily? A lot probably. So we are constantly causing stimulation of the calves. I believe your calves can take a lot of work. Have you ever seen an obese persons calves? They are huge! Why? Because their calves are forced to work hard moving all that weight from point A to point B. The body and calves in particular have been placed under a lot of stress. The body doesnt like to be under stress, so it has to overcome that in some way so it builds the muscle in the calves up to support the extra weight and work.

What have we learned so far? Well the calves work by plantar flexion (pushing the toes into the ground, standing on your tip toes). They also allow us to walk, run, and jump. This means everyday we are using our calves and forcing them to work. I do not feel the calves are easily over worked and feel frequency training is key in calf growth. Also Heavier weight with a full flexion and extension of the muscle.

With that being said here is the workout I would suggest:

Train calves with every workout. Start with them this way you actually do them!
You will want to do some sort or standing calf raise I would suggest your regular standing calf raise machine, or the good old squat rack calf raises. Then you are going to move to seated calf raises not to much variations you can do for this, I have a body weight seated calf raise video I will post up soon you can try.
You are going to do 30 total reps with each of these exercises each set.


Standing calf raises 30 reps 3 sets
Seated Calf Raises 30 reps 2 set


On leg day start with leg press calf raises this can be your heavier move. You will do 3 sets of 30, then at the end of your workout do 6 squat jumps and then 30 seated calf raises. The squat jumps will help neurally activate your calves and will also finish off your quads.


Try this for about 3 weeks and tell me if your calves havent grown!


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Heath Ellenberger
AI SPORTS Trainer
www.trainerheath.com
Xtreme Performance Training