Do you want bigger calf muscles? Are you one of those people who has been genetically modified when it comes to the muscles between your knees and ankles? Are you a natural bodybuilder? Perfect; This article is for you.
First of all, you couldn’t be starting off worse than me. Before I solved the calf-building situation, I had something akin to “tubes” for my lower legs. They were often the centerpiece of the laugh. I could have sworn they had been handed out to the wrong guy. They looked out of place on my body, as if they should have been someone’s calves with smaller…well, everything; a smaller body. I was desperate.
Unfortunately, my first few attempts at building calves were futile. I did everything I was told; higher training frequency, lots of sets, hitting them from different angles, whatever. Did I get a “bomb”? your bet So what; calves that look like sticks don’t improve much in appearance even when they’re full of blood.
Now my calves are just shy of 16 inches. That’s not huge by any means, but it’s great when you consider where they came from and that I’m still a natural bodybuilder. And they are slim at that size; carrying very little fat and showing an ugly looking vein when I dropped my body fat a few percentage points. In fact, they now look good with a pair of shorts; with form, strength and athleticism.
What is my ‘how to build big calves’ recommendation in a nutshell? In a word: ‘burn-reps’, and lots of them. You have to make those muscles behind your shins feel like they might set off the gym’s fire alarm due to the flames and smoke coming from them. You need to hit them with an intensity that makes the tissue say “Geez, Toto… I guess we’re not in Kansas anymore.” (“Kansas” in this case would be walking, running and standing what they are used to)
Besides high intensity, my second tip is ‘low training frequency’. You need to ensure that the muscles fully recover between workouts for the increase to occur. Many people mistakenly believe that the calves need to be worked more often than other muscles. They need to be trained differently, but why more often? Muscles only grow while resting between workouts. We shot them down during training sessions. So unless someone can present evidence that calf tissue recovers faster than other muscle tissue, there is no logical reason for you to train more often. They just need to be hit harder. Training them too frequently can result in overtraining, with lost time and gains being the sad result.
A calf raise is a calf raise (except ‘seated’)
Did you know that standing calf raises and donkey calf raises hit the same part of your calf muscles? Yes, we have been led to believe when we went from one of these gym machines to the other; somehow we are hitting our calves differently. However, they both put equal pressure on the medial and lateral heads of the gastrocnemus muscle (that’s the meaty part of the calf). “Seated calf raises,” on the other hand, target the soleus muscle that sits just below the gastrocnemius.
The calf muscles are made up of a few fast-twitch muscle fibers and many slow-twitch fibers. That means they require some heavy sets of low reps (for fast-twitch fibers) and a fair amount of high-rep sets (for slow-twitch fibers). I do about six sets of eight reps using a full range of motion on a donkey calf raise machine to hit the fast twitch fibers. I prefer donkey calf raises to standing calf raises because they seem to provide a fuller range of motion and don’t put pressure on the lower back.
“Burn ‘Em Out” with Partial Replays
When the full range of motion in the six to eight rep range has brought my calves to a state of fatigue, I immediately move into a very high rep set of partial range of motion reps. These are called ‘burn reps’ for good reason. The discomfort they can cause can be a great measure of one’s level of determination. It’s easy to use the same weight for these due to the reduced range of motion. I take this set of partial reps in the hundreds (reps are fast) and keep firing to break up my previous reps until it makes sense to increase weight instead of reps.
When doing these high rep, partial range of motion sets, it’s important to work both the lower half of the range of a full calf raise and the upper half. I do about three or four sets of total reps.
I then continue with seated calf raises to get to the soleus section. Once again, after doing sets of six to eight reps, I jump right into some burning reps on this exercise. However, I only do one or two sets of burning reps on this exercise because my calves are pretty well worn at that point.
With this type of training, you don’t need to train your calves more often than other muscle groups. They just need high reps and high intensity partial reps for stimulation. However, it is a lot of recovery between workouts that causes growth. Make sure you feel that warm feeling of relaxed expansion in the fabric before you think about your next calf workout.
It is worth mentioning that this training strategy is a far cry from what should be used for all other muscle groups. At least, that is, if you are a natural bodybuilder and want to make impressive muscle gains.
This type of calf training has taken my seemingly hopeless “tubes” and expanded them to resemble “diamonds.” If you’re looking for a way to get more of that diamond shape yourself, I highly recommend it.