And I want to explain to those lifters out there who, like myself, have naturally very
thin and, kind of, stubborn calves, why you aren't seeing any real noticeable calf gains.
Now, the genetic component obviously plays a big role here.
I've talked about this in previous videos.
And, yeah, there's no question that if you aren't blessed with naturally muscular calves
and if you have I'm just, kind of, a smaller lower leg structure in general with a long
calf tendon that causes your calves to be shorter from top to bottom, yeah, there's
no question that it is gonna be harder to build them up significantly.
However, with the proper plan in place most people can still make some really solid improvements
in their calf development given enough time.
And the reason why most lifters with naturally thin calves just don't see the gains they're
after in my view is actually pretty straight forward, and it's because you're just not
calculating your calf training volume properly.
See, what most people do when calculating their training volume is they take their large
muscle groups and then they assign a weekly number of sets and reps to those muscle groups,
and then they take their small muscle groups and they assign a weekly volume range to those
muscles, and they say, okay, well the calves are a “small muscle group”, so they should
be trained with the same workload as the other small muscle groups like the biceps, or the
triceps, or the lateral delts, or whatever else.
But the problem with that approach is that unlike the calves all those smaller upper
body muscles are getting a large amount of secondary stimulation during compound exercises,
whereas outside of direct calf work your calves really aren't being hit hard at all.
Your biceps are being stimulated for growth during pull-ups, pull-downs, rows.
Your triceps are hit hard on every single set of chest and shoulder pressing.
Your delts are hit to some degree on pretty much every single upper body lift that you
do in general.
And even when you're trying to target one area of your back, say your lats, usually
other areas of your back like your traps or your smaller mid-back muscles, those are gonna
be involved as well.
But when it comes to calves, even when you do a big compound leg movement like a squat,
or a leg press, or a deadlift, your calves only act as a dynamic stabilizer during those
exercises which means that they don't actually change in length during the movement.
So you're really not getting much of a growth stimulus there.
Let's take the triceps as an example, let's say you're doing eight sets of horizontal
pressing per week for chest and you're doing four sets of overhead pressing for shoulders,
that's 12 sets per week where your triceps are being heavily stimulated on top of all
the direct isolation work you're already doing, so if you're doing six sets of tricep extensions
per week, and then let's conservatively say that each of those compound pressing exercises
only counted as half a set for your triceps, that's 12 total units of volume that you'd
be doing per week for your triceps.
So if you're then putting your calf isolation work in the same category as your triceps
and you're doing six sets for them, on the surface it looks like you're doing the same
amount of work when in reality you're only doing about half as much.
And then in addition to that there's two other important things you have to consider here:
the first is that the calves aren't actually as small a muscle group as most people think.
iIf you really compare the total mass, let's say your biceps to your calves, you'll see
that your calves are quite a bit bigger.
There's the gastrocnemius, which is the visible portion on the outside which has both a lateral
and a medial head, and then you have the soleus that runs underneath which is only slightly
smaller than the gastrocnemius is.
So rather than equating your calves to, say your biceps or to your triceps, it's actually
more accurate to compare your calves to your entire upper arm as a whole.
And then secondly, most people really don't train their calves with nearly as much intensity
on each set as they really could be.
The calves are actually a really strong set of muscles, and when you load up the true
amount of weight that they're capable of handling and then you train right up near failure,
maybe within a rep or two, the calves are actually a really uncomfortable muscle group
to train.
Most lifters out there just load up some random amount of weight and then they pump out some
quick reps at the end of their workout until it starts to burn and then they stop.
But if you really slow down your cadence, so let your heels hang down for one to two
seconds at the bottom, drive right up onto your toes as hard as you can, hold for a second
at the top, and then lower back down in about three to four seconds and go right up near
failure, calf training is legitimately hard.
In my opinion, it's a lot more challenging than training, say your biceps or your triceps
or your shoulders.
So when you add all of this up the bottom line is that your calves just aren't getting
enough total stimulation throughout the week, period.
I know it sounds pretty straightforward but that's really what it comes down to and most
people don't even realize that they're under training them because, again, they're treating
their calves in the same way as their other small muscle groups when in reality it really
isn't a fair comparison.
Now, in practical terms it's really up to you what you choose to do with this information
because it ultimately depends on your personal goals and the time and the effort investment
that you're willing to make.
But if you are someone who wants to fully optimize their calf development and you aren't
seeing the results you want right now, then you likely just need to buckle down and hit
them harder, period.
As a general rule, I recommend usually between 4 to 8 direct sets per week for small muscle
groups, and so for optimal calf gains I'd recommend going at the highest end of that
range as a minimum, and then for maximum gains I'd say more like 10 to 12 sets per week.
And so you could break that up into, let's say 5 to 6 sets per workout twice per week,
which is actually still pretty reasonable.
Or the other option if you do want to be more time efficient is that you do keep the volume
a bit lower.
So let's say, you do stick to six sets of direct calf work per week in total but you
really ramp up the intensity level per set by going all the way to failure.
I don't recommend training to failure all the time for every muscle group but for smaller
muscle groups like the calves it's probably gonna be fine since it won't stress your body
as a whole in the same way that a big compound lift taken to failure is going to.
So one other consideration if you want to burn your calves up is that you train all
of your other muscle groups around one to two reps short of failure but then you take
your calf sets all the way to failure to give them that extra boost.
And then, of course, regardless of which approach you use here, make sure you're applying progressive
overload to your calf training as well.
You want to be consistently increasing the weight and the reps over time.
Make sure your form is solid like I mentioned before, a good controlled cadence to maximize
the stress on the calves and to minimize the involvement of the achilles tendon.
And, of course, be patient here because no matter how you go about this the reality is
that there is a big genetic component involved when it comes to building up your calves,
and if you have naturally skinny calves then it's likely going to take many months or even
years of consistent training to truly build them up to what would be considered an impressive
level.
So thanks for watching, guys.
I hope this advice was helpful.
If you want to get a complete breakdown of how to properly train all the major muscle
groups on your body including step-by-step routines for beginners, intermediates and
more advanced lifters, then you can check out my Body Transformation Blueprint program
by clicking the icon up at the top of the screen here, or by visiting www.BTBluePrint.com.
For those who are new to the channel my brand new science-based pre workout fish oil and
multivitamin are also now available over at www.RealScienceAthletics.com, the link for
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Thanks for watching, guys.
And I'll see you in the next video.