- Hi, I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist
- Brad Heineck, physical therapist.
- And together we are the most famous
physical therapists on the internet.
- In our opinion, of course.
- Brad, today, we're gonna talk
about top three ways to strengthen your calves.
Now, first off, let's one thing about calves.
Everybody should know.
- Where are the calves?
- Well they're right here.
- Not in the field time.
- Woohoo.
But the other thing is I'm just gonna warn you
that genetically you're kind of stuck
with the calves you are.
I, I, I used to be a weight lifter
and people that try to build up their calves.
You can build 'em up a little bit
but if you think, if you got little skinny calves
like I do that look better, you know
I've seen better legs on my kitchen table.
They're not gonna build them up.
- Me too. Me too.
- You got pretty good calves,
don't you, Brad?
- I don't know they're falling apart
but they're, they're there.
See, you got better calves than I do, but yeah
and I don't do any, any lifting or anything.
I just do aerobic work with them, so.
- I don't either, but calves
frankly, by way is good for your balance.
It will help.
- Oh yeah.
- Your balance.
If you're a runner and you tend to run more
on your toes or on full foot
you probably don't need to do 'em either, but...
- Right.
- It's up to you.
- So, alright.
Real simple.
You can do it off a stairway
off a step I mean.
- Sure.
- You can go off the edge or if you have one
of these slack boards that I think Brad,
you... we talked about how to
make one in one of our groups.
- Right Yep. We have an incline board,
I think it might be.
- And this is a foam one from OPTP.
OPTP, if you want to Google that it
and it's just one of their foam slant boards.
So what you're gonna do is very simple
and you get up on there with both legs
like this and you gotta have something to balance.
- Yep.
- And you're gonna have to move your foot, Brad.
- Oh, sorry, Bob.
- So you're just gonna start working it like this.
- So the nice thing about this down here
is you start out you can get a little bit
of a stretch but you're getting
a strengthening range of motion from all the way
to dorsal flection, as we call it,
and to plantar flection.
So this is a more complete way to strengthen it.
- [Bob] Yep. And I actually, when I started doing Brad
I did actually start doing this.
I take that back.
When I stretch in the mornings, I do
I finish with a few of these strengthen.
- Okay. Sure. You bet.
- [Bob] All right. That's phase one.
Phase two to make it harder.
You're actually gonna hold on, will you.
- You bet.
- You're gonna go up
on one foot and this does make it harder.
- Yeah. You're doubling the weight for that...
that muscle group.
- Exactly
- So I'm, mine are starting to fatigue already.
- Oh yeah. I believe it.
I can believe that.
- So again, if you're gonna do these,
I would say a good set of eight to 10.
- Sure.
- And, and you can do three sets.
Now. This is also very controversial.
How often can you do these?
Some people say you can do calves every day.
- Mhm.
- It's almost like abs and other people say,
no, you treat it like any other muscle group,
you know, maybe twice a week.
So that's gonna have to be up to you.
You're gonna have to figure out if you're a runner.
I wouldn't be doing it every day.
You know what I mean?
Cause you're getting that work.
If you're a biker, even.
You're working the calves pretty good.
- Yeah.
- All right. Phase three.
Just the top to three, you can put a weight
on the same side or a weight
on the opposite side, depending on
if you wanna try to really try to balance yourself,
but you're gonna have a weight and you're gonna push up.
- Yeah.
- That's gonna add even more weight.
You have to make it even harder.
- Sure. Now, Brad.
- Yeah, Bob!
- I remember the old days
when I used to watch weightlifters
and I swear to God guys used to do this.
Come on, Brad.
I saw guys that used to guys get up on their back,
come on, sit over here.
- By the way, this is for people 40 and over, our video.
- Right
- This is for people, the particular exercise,
is for people 40 and over, but they think
they are 20 years old.
- And they're crazy.
- Yeah, so. I don't remember doing this.
- All right
- Bob wants to do it so he...
- Come on. 140.
- So, I'm... okay.
If you don't have enough dumbbells in your hands to hold
you get a dumbbell to jump on your back.
Like this.
- There we go.
And they're gonna go up and they're gonna raise up.
All right.
- Oh boy.
- Peace out.
- Okay, Brad, we forgot to go
over this little addendum here on how to
if you want to make a
two by four support that could
do calf raises on it.
Real easy one to do.
You just need four pieces of wood.
Two of the pieces of wood need to be 10 inches in length.
These are the under undergirds
- Yep. I gotcha.
- And two of the pieces of wood
need to be 20 inches in length.
So all you're doing is you could, you know
glue these two pieces together
and then nail 'em into the, you know, the board below.
- Sure.
- And, and you have a nice support here.
I hope this see is visually, can you understand this, Brad?
- Yeah. We're gonna put our foot right here.
- Yeah. Right on that.
- Yeah.
- Make kind of a step.
I got this from another website
and he really does a good job.
So I probably should give him credit Scooby 1961.
He he's a big guy.
- Oh okay. And that's what he uses?
- Yep exactly.
_ If Scooby does it...
- You can't go wrong. Thanks.
(piano music)