# Need help on calves!



## Mitch3023 (Nov 7, 2017)

I have just started at a new gym. It's great but they have no calves machines or smith machines in the gym. I do legs twice a week and have done for a while. But with calves, I have always used the seated calve and the smith machine. I know I could use a bar and do the same as I would on a smith machine but my balance isn't the best (which I know I need to work on).

Do you have any alternative workouts I could use for calves that don't use either of these??


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## GMDJ (Mar 9, 2016)

Leg press with half your foot off the bottom of the plate. Although on some leg press machines you can't.

https://www.bodybuilding.com/exercises/calf-press-on-the-leg-press-machine

Lee Priest said 100 calf raises off a step/stairs several times a week does wonders.


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## Frankie.88 (Sep 24, 2017)

Mitch3023 said:


> I have just started at a new gym. It's great but they have no calves machines or smith machines in the gym. I do legs twice a week and have done for a while. But with calves, I have always used the seated calve and the smith machine. I know I could use a bar and do the same as I would on a smith machine but my balance isn't the best (which I know I need to work on).
> 
> Do you have any alternative workouts I could use for calves that don't use either of these??


 I have a similar problem with the gym at work.. do a google image search for "calf exercises squat rack" u will get some inspo from there


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## nWo (Mar 25, 2014)

I don't even train calves at the gym anymore. They've been a stubborn area since I started training, BUT I've grown them over an inch in the last couple of months since I started training them at home 3 days a week. Here's what I do 3x a week on my stairs at home holding a dumbbell - you might not even need the dumbbell since calves can be trained with high reps, I tend to aim for around 10-15 reps on the standing calf raises and 15-20 on the kneeling ones, and I use a bit more weight when I can achieve more. No rest between sets/exercises so it's basically all supersetted, go to failure and even do some partial reps after failure on every exercise:

Single-leg standing calf raise

Squatting calf raises (both legs) - the leg you just trained will fail first while the other will get mild fatigue

Single-leg calf standing calf raise on the other leg

Squatting calf raises (both legs) - this time the other leg (the one you just trained) will fail first and the other will get a bit more work.

Standing calf raise (both legs) - finish up both calves with a burn.

Alternate which leg you start with on each workout or you might experienced imbalanced calves! The whole workout literally takes a few minutes.

Here's how you do squatting calf raises btw - if you've got the balance then you can do them without holding onto anything like I do, you can also hold onto a bannister or something to stabilise yourself like in the video but try not to actually lean on it or you'll take some weight off your calves.






The good thing about this approach as well is, given that you're basically training the muscle in a fatigued state when you hit failure on standing raises and go into these bent-legged ones, is that they hit the soleus, which is typically slow-twitch dominant so they'll benefit from being trained metabolically like this. A lot of people neglect bent-legged calf training such as seated calf raises or these, which is why a lot of people have shitty calves (I too was always guilty of this until I had a proper look into calf anatomy recently) - the soleus is the long head of the calves and actually runs from the bottom of the knee right down to the ankle, and the gastrocnemius basically sits on top of the soleus.

So by training and causing hypertrophy on your soleus, you're increasing your overall calf size, whereas people think that because the gastros are the muscles at the top that "pop" that they'll get big calves just by training these. Sorta similar to your forearms, you can train forearms every day with reverse curls and wrist curls to make your brachioradialis pop, but if you don't train the rest of the musculature (which in this case is generally trained by handling heavy weights and strengthening your grip) then your forearms will always look s**t. If you train the underlying muscles in the calves, i.e. the soleus, then the gastrocnemius will be pushed out and made to look bigger. The gastrocnemius is actually a pretty thin slab of muscle that sits on top of the soleus and tends to grow in width more than it does thickness. So if you just train your calves with standing variations then you'll probably notice that your calves pop out at the sides quite nicely and look decent from the front and back, but they disappear when you turn to the side.










*In short* - don't neglect to train the soleus with bent-legged calf exercises and high reps and/or metabolic training, to hypertrophy the soleus which is responsible for the majority of your overall calf size. The gastrocnemius is slightly more dominant in fast-twitch fibres than the soleus, so it makes sense to train it first in your calf training and with more moderate reps, and essentially, is more responsible for calf width whereas the soleus is responsible for most of the thickness.


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## dtlv (Jul 24, 2009)

Similarly to @I'mNotAPervert!, I think probably the best calf growth I've had has been training them at home 3-4 times a week with a dumbbell, either using the stairs or some other platform. My exercise of choice is the single leg calf raise. I'd use a rep target of 100 reps for each leg, starting by doing as many reps as I could with my weaker leg until ROM decreased too much, then doing the same number for my stronger leg. I'd then switch back again with no rest and repeat until I'd done 100reps for each leg. Sets would of course get shorter as fatigue hit. When I could do the 100 reps in four sets or fewer then I'd add weight for the next session.

I haven't actually done this way in a while and have been trying to squeeze some progress out of the calf machine at my gym by trying different loads, foot positions etc but it's just not working as well so am thinking of going back to the above. Sometimes the simple solution is the best one.


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## TommyP87 (Feb 18, 2017)

I always feel as though my legs don't get the rest they need to repair and grow due to being busy on my feet all day in work especially my calves. I have very long skinny calves but I'm going to give this home calf training a shot.


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## StanleyHudson (Jul 11, 2017)

i started seeing gains in my calves once i slowed my reps down and started hitting more volume


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