Many people struggle with calves. Many exercisers invest time and effort in building them, but their calves still lag behind the rest of their legs in terms of size. How to solve it?
The calves are muscles that many people have small and it is a difficult and big task to work on them so that they grow and take a nice shape. However, this problem can also be solved if the exercises for building the calves are approached in a somewhat specific way. We provide all the details on how to increase calf muscle mass.
Calves – anatomy
The hamstrings are a muscle group located on the back of the lower leg and consisting of two muscles: the gastrocnemius muscle and the soleus muscle. M. gastrocnemius is a larger calf muscle that forms a ball under the skin. This muscle has two heads, or two parts, which together form the diamond shape of this muscle. M. soleus is a smaller, flat muscle that is located below the gastrocnemius.
The gastrocnemius and soleus muscles taper and join at the base of the calf muscle. The tough connective tissue at the bottom of the calf muscle connects to the Achilles tendon. The Achilles tendon enters the heel bone at the bottom. When walking, running or jumping, the calf muscles pull the heel up to allow us to move forward.
Dedicate the entire training session to the calves.
The rule is simple. If a muscle group lags behind the others, you have to pay more attention to it, and that means the whole training. The same is the case with leaves.
Instead of doing exercises for the calves along with exercises of another part of the body and thus not directing enough focus or enough energy to them, we advise you to do one training session a week only with the legs and thus focus on them as much as possible.
High repetitions to failure for muscle growth
Whatever muscle you are working on, it is extremely important to bring that muscle to a state of fatigue. This is precisely the only prerequisite for muscle growth, in order to induce adaptation and stimulate regeneration and muscle growth after activity. To get the most out of your calf training, use an external load and increase the number of repetitions until complete fatigue.
For example, if you've been doing 15 repetitions so far and haven't progressed, now increase the external load and raise the number of repetitions to 20. Whatever you do, make your goal be to maximally exhaust your calves and progress will surely happen.
Stretching the calves can help growth
It is good to warm up the calves with some kind of dynamic stretching before the training itself. Stretching reduces the risk of muscle cramps after activity. Therefore, we advise you to start calf training with exercises to warm up these muscles, such as skips or light running. This type of warm-up reduces the risk of injury because it increases muscle elasticity and prepares the muscle for the stretches and contractions it experiences during training.
Work your calves on training days of other muscle groups as well
If your calves are lagging behind and you want to increase them, in addition to training the calves separately, do the exercises for this muscle group as part of the training of other muscle groups. For example, if you are doing a back workout today, set aside 10 minutes at the end of the workout and do 2 calf exercises, 4 sets of 15-20 repetitions each.
If you carry out this tactic every day, week after week, you will simply reduce to the maximum the chance that the leaves will not continue to grow. Also, perform as wide a range of exercises as possible in order to "hit" these muscles from all sides.
Train strong and hard
As mentioned earlier, it is advised to do a lot of repetitions with a lot of weight for the calves. As you will quickly reach a plateau in this way, we recommend that you then combine heavier and lighter loads. When working with heavy weights, reduce the number of repetitions and vice versa. This approach will allow the muscle tissue to recover and regenerate which is necessary for muscle growth.
Be persistent!
Many will give up when they don't see the desired results after a couple of weeks, but that's a big mistake you can make. When it comes to calves, you have to be persistent and persistent to get your results. Therefore, set aside one workout a week for calf training, and in addition, do 1-2 calf exercises on all other days.
If you really have to, skip a workout or two, but for any results and calf muscle growth you have to be patient and work and work!
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