Give it to me straight fellas can you actually grow your calves? Has anyone here with shitty calf genetics like me ever made progress on growing their calves? I have a 500 squat and my calves look bad still.
Give it to me straight fellas can you actually grow your calves? Has anyone here with shitty calf genetics like me ever made progress on growing their calves? I have a 500 squat and my calves look bad still.
Load up a heavy pack and go backpacking, it'll grow your calves super quickly. That said, it's not great for your knees. If you can't get calf gains doing calf raises you're kinda fricked as the alternatives all can be bad for knees.
If you're walking or rooning make sure you push off with your toes (plantarflexion) and not just walking on your heels.
Hill sprints or take up hiking
you need to remember to point to them mid-workout and say I COMMAND YOU TO GROW
Based CT Fletcher enjoyer
You have to murder calves with volume. It's why mountain bikers have monster calves. In the gym that'll mean doing standing calf raises 3x10-15 with double dropsets followed by seated calf raises with the same setup. You should need a minute to recover before walking
t. Metamundanity
Hi newbie
Yes you can grow your calves.
No YOU personally can't because you're not willing to put in the effort to actually do so.
Bye.
Just don’t focus on one kind of calf raise. Seated, standing, and donkey raises all do a different spot.
>he thought squats would train his calves
Can get implants in South Korea for like $1000 . Frick actually training calves
1. Straight leg calf raises 10 sets a week (5x15-20 twice a week); I prefer doing it on the closed chain leg press machine as you get less spinal compression
2. Incline walking/hiking/stairmaster 30 min - 3 hours at least once a week
You NEED to do (2) to grow calves since they work your slow twitch muscle fibres which your calves have in abundance
Might try calves on closed chain leg press instead. Right now only use OP's picrel and it's getting slightly uncomfortable on my back and shoulders at 150kg. Thanks for advice anon.
Stop doing the standing shit it's so inefficient. If you're actually trying on those it'll take 5pl8s to just feel it in the calves. Seated straight leg calf raises on a leg press or seated bent knee calf raise machines are all you should be doing. Go do meme shit like "jogging/hiking/sprinting for calves" if you like listening to 140lb homosexuals for bodybuilding advice.
Get a weighted vest or find some way to apply weight to your body. Then do 3 minutes of skipping x3. The more times per week the better. The the kickboxers at my gym that do this calf mog the hell out of everyone else I know.
>weight continues to go up
>calves remain the same
at least they're stronger
Unironically get fat. Worked for me, stayed big once I got skinny. But for some actual advice I once asked this chick in hs with still the biggest calves ive ever seen on a woman, she said she used to always walk on her tippy-toes and sometimes still accidently do it. So yea do that
Hike the AT.
Calves are designed to take a beating and respond to frequency better than just loading up on heavy weight and hitting them twice a week like you would your other leg muscles. Do 3-5 sets of bodyweight calf raises AMRAP every day or every other day and i guarantee you they will grow.
a set of amrap bodyweight calf raises is easily in the hundreds, cardio or balance will fail long b4 your calves do
If you don't have well developed calves and are getting full ROM by doing them off of a raised surface like stairs i'd say 100-200 would be your reasonable AMRAP, it being bodyweight just has the advantage you can do them literally anywhere but you could use dumbells too. Some youtuber did an experiment where he did 1000 bodyweight calf raises every day for a week and the whole thing took about 20-25 minutes iirc. By the end of the week he had put 1/2 inch on each calf.
You can build them as a natty, but you need to train them both high intensity and high frequency.
Your calves are basically your mirror birraro forearms and they both respond well to a wrist roller.
It's tough at first, but once your toes get stronger do as many full up and down reps holding it with your feet as you can.
Picrel is my calf so you can see that it works. Just remember to be patient.
As you can see, I added sports tape to my old maglight wrist roller for better grip since often times my toes fatigue before my calves.
Everyone does calf raises wrong. Instead of squeezing at the top, everyone just bounces up there and back down.
You also need to do the reverse and do curls with weights on top of your feet
Ignore all the dyels in this thread, what your calves need is weighted stretch. Do weighted single leg calf raises (adding weight with a dip belt is the preferred option bc both hands are free to stabilize but a db is also fine), but use a slow eccentric and hold the bottom position for 3 seconds. Make sure your knee is locked and you squeeze your tibialis anterior to try to pull yourself as deep as possible into the stretch. Use a weight that you'll only be able to get for 3-5 reps with these parameters, but after you hit failure continue with eccentric only reps for another 8-12 reps. After your final rep, hold the bottom position for 10 seconds. Just one set of this is enough to make you sore as hell, I personally do 1 set of this 3 times a week because I can't recover from more than that. After this do some work for your soleus, but bc it's harder to get an insane stretch on it you'll probably have to do more sets. This method is by far the best IMO because the time investment is extremely low, just 10-15 minutes a week for the gastroc and a bit more for the soleus. While yes you can grow your calves by doing ridiculous amounts of volume, in practice it chews up too much time and few people are going to bother with that because doing 20+ sets of calves a week is boring as hell.
>t. have finally gotten my stubborn calves to grow with this method
Also as an addendum spending so much time in the bottom position on these has made my gastrocs very flexible, which is a nice bonus I suppose. It is a bit annoying though as now my ROM gets limited by ankle mobility which sucks because my left ankle has much better mobility than my right (not from tight achilles, it feels bones jamming in the front of my ankle? No idea how to fix that) which makes me wonder if one calf is getting a better stretch than the other. Haven't seen any major growth discrepencies so far so hopefully it isn't an issue.