What s up guys, Jeff Cavaliere, athleanx.com. So if you're looking to get bigger calves,
I'm going to show you what you can do here today. Now, I've shown you something in the past as a
good calf exercise to do. However, some either don't have the set up to be able to do it or
they feel a little bit too much in the hamstring. Well, that is one of those exercises that delivers
its gains through the overload and tension that you get from it. But if you're going to go on
the easier end here, you're going to have to increase the volume. And one of the best ways
to increase the volume is to do a simple standing calf raise, but do it every single day. And it's
not going to take you a long period of time here, but you do have to make a couple of very
important changes to how you do these if you want to do it right. So, Jesse here--
Hey guys. --our local calf not. I talk about you re either
a calf or a calf not. I happen to be somewhat of a calf not, Jesse is definitely a calf not. Which,
by the way, isn t necessarily his fault or your fault if you re in the same situation,
since we know calf size is largely determined by genetics. But nonetheless, improvable with smart,
consistent training, like I'm going to show you here. What you want to do is evaluate how you do
your calf raises. Because doing the standard high rep, low weight, bounce your way through your sets
approach is really doing nothing more than feeding into the ballistic way that your Achilles tendon
prefers to function to the detriment of your calf development, as you can see here in a second.
So, first thing, you want to go one leg at a time, right? You're going to be able to deliver
more tension into that calf and more focused tension than doing a simple barbell calf raise
with both legs at a time or dumbbell calf raise, both legs at a time where you can sort of hide
your imbalances in strength. The second thing you want to do is change the tempo that we do this.
Why? The Achilles tendon is one of the strongest tendons in your entire body. This is a ballistic
tendon. It transfers quickly between plantar flection and dorsiflexion on every step we take
because it has a high capacity for force. But what happens is it also robs the calf muscle
itself of a lot of the tension that it can help out and deliver as well. Why? Because it's the
first line of defense. It's the most proximal to the ground, and it takes those forces, and it
prevents them from being transmitted up the chain into this calf muscle. So, this is one of those
instances where the Achilles is actually being functionally efficient and making, let's say,
running easier, but preventing the muscular inefficiency that I talk about all the time
that we need to seek when we're trying to force a stubborn muscle to grow.
So how can we change that? Slow down the cadence. Jesse pick up your dumbbell for a second. So,
what you re going to do is you're going to get into this position, and we want to try to remove
the ballistic capacity of the Achilles tendon. Right? So, we get down into the stretch position
and I'm saying all the way down to where you feel a real stretch on the bottom of this rep.
And then from there, we come up after four seconds and we get to the top here.
And now you don't just stay there, once you there, you go up even higher
all the way to the peak there for four seconds. And we slowly come back down again,
and we get all the way to the bottom four seconds. There is no bouncing back and forth.
This is truly from dorsiflexion here, slowly back up to the top into planar reflection. And again,
by removing that, the calf itself has to do way more of the work. How are you feeling?
Oh, it sucks. So two reps in and he's already starting
to feel it. I don't care how many reps you get. I talk about in the past, you either make the reps
count or you count the reps. This is where you re going to want to make the reps count. You cannot
care about counting here. You just have to make them count by going all the way to the bottom
and removing this distribution of force that gets usually robbed by the Achilles tendon. And that's
it, guys. Basically, if you take this exercise and you do it each side, three sets, per side,
forget about the number of reps that you're using. When you can exceed, let's say, 10 reps per side,
you've got to increase the weight. You don't need to go any more than three sets. You increase the
weight, so you continue to create more overload as the muscle gets stronger. And while getting
stronger it can also help you to offload some of the high force that the Achilles itself takes on
that could lead to some of those tears. So, guys, make sure you leave your comments and
thumbs up below. Let me know how it works for you. Jesse himself is actually going to incorporate
this for the next few weeks. We'll give you an update on how it goes. If you're looking
for programs guys where we put the science back in strength. You can head to athleanx.com. And also,
if you find the video helpful, make sure click subscribe and turn on your notifications so
you never miss a new video when we put out. All right guys see you soon.