everyone Daniel Daniel Fitness a fake use today's video we're going to talk about calf training
before we start the video I want to preface by saying I am well aware that I've got small man
calf syndrome I don't have great calves by any means of the imagination I've got very small
muscle bellies and a long tendon meaning that there's only so much potential for growth due to
the genetic makeup of my origin insertion of the muscle I have a running joke that my girlfriend
has better carves than me she's never done a weighted calf raise in her life but that's the
way it goes some people are naturally gifted with having better insertions of their muscles but at
the end of the day you can't have us talk about it you've got what you've got you can't change
the shape of the muscle but you definitely have the potential to increase the size of what you
got before we get started it's important we know the function of the carbs so the carbs
are made up of two muscles the gastrocnemius and the soleus the gastrocnemius is a plantar flexor
meaning when you point your toes towards the ground or when you're standing when you lift
your heels up the muscle contracts and performs its function because the gastrocnemius crosses
the knee as well as the ankle it also is a weak knee flexor to preferentially target the soleus
muscle we need to perform our calf raises with a bend knee the celeste gets recruited in the bent
knee version preferentially because in this position we're placing the gastrocnemius in
a mechanically disadvantaged position meaning it can't contribute as much to the movement ensuring
that we can work that size it's important to understand the makeup of the different
muscles to understand why we're performing the exercises in the fashion that we are to
start with the gastrocnemius is predominantly a fast twitch muscle this means that it's going
to respond to high loads performed explosively with the Celeste on the other and it's referred
to as a slow twitch muscle it's predominantly utilized in a tonic fashion meaning it's more of
a postural muscle you go into any commercial gym and I guarantee you that the majority of people
are performing their calf raises incorrectly most people use too much weight a really short range
of motion and worst of all they tend to bounce their repetitions the reason why bouncing when
doing calf raise is not a good idea is because of the stretch reflex a stretch reflex is whereby
you follow a rapid eccentric contraction with a immediate concentrate contraction what happens
here is this process actually stores elastic energy and then it releases this elastic energy
propelling you up into the next repetition and this decreases muscular work if you eliminate
the stretch reflex you don't have to use as much weight and the exercise will be much
more difficult you're going to get a better training stimulus and you're going to develop
your calves now that we understand the anatomy of the calves their function their muscle fiber
makeup it'll make sense to you as to why I recommend the following set rep and temper
structure to begin with let's talk about the straight leg calf raise predominantly working
the gastrocnemius as well as the Celeste so when you're doing this guys I like four sets of six
and a following tempo three-second eccentric a two second pause at the bottom coming up as
explosively as you can getting a one-second pause at the top to get that full muscle contraction and
then repeating that four reps to predominantly work the Celeste we need to use a bent leg calf
raise you can either use the bent leg calf raise machine at your gym if you don't have one just use
a smith machine and set up for the exercise as I'm showing here as we know the Celeste is more
of a postural muscle comprised of slow twitch muscle fibers meaning it's going to respond
better to higher repetitions I recommend doing four sets of ten to twelve with the following
temper to second e centric one-second pause the bottom two-second concentric and a one-second
pause at the top I highly recommend doing it two times per week training frequency because as we
know with muscular development muscle protein synthesis is only elevated for around 48 to at
most 72 hours bowling training this means that by training twice a week we can allow adequate
recovery and ensure that most of the week our calves are actually growing if we're resting
and eating well each workout your focus is simply to progressively overload by incrementally adding
weight week to week only add weight if you're able to stick to the set and rep range following the
temper correctly and utilizing a full range of motion with that being said guys you don't have
to be an absolute drill sergeant every single rep when it comes to following tempo just the
major takeaway is a full range of motion perform the exercise with a rough tempo that coincides
with a muscle fiber type that we're working and make sure that you're not bouncing to sum up guys
Fitness fa Q's is all about applying a functional Anatomy a scientific approach to training but at
the same time we're not forgetting that in order to get results we need to be consistent we need
to Train really really hard and we have to push ourselves if you apply that all to your training
I guarantee you're going to get awesome results and you're going to be the best version that
you can possibly be thanks guys for watching thumbs up the video to support the channel
leave a comment below and I'll see you next week Friday for our video breaking on Fitness fa Q's