Do This EVERY Day for Bigger Calves! (ONE MOVE)

If you want to build bigger calves and feel like you have tried everything without success, you are going to want to watch this video before you avoid training your calf muscles for good. I’m going to show you in one move how to perform a common calf exercise a different way that could unlock all ne

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.