paulo

awrite what do you reckon is best for mass building calfs?, want some size increases-weight,low reps or high reps,have naturally thin calfs and need them to catch up with thighs-anyone had similar issue and resloved it

Nine Pack

The calves spend all day carting you around & each one can take your much more than your entire bodyweight on it's own. What you have is a muscle with plenty of endurance & contractile strength. In order to get them to adapt, they need a stimulus different from the volume of work they get all day long. Try this:

Standing calf raises: 2 sets of 12-15 to warmup, very slow reps from a full stretch to a full contraction. Try going six seconds in each direction & you must try to override your instinct to contract the muscle quickly. Then do a working set of 8-10 to complete blood curdling failure at the same tempo.

Now hobble over to the seated calf raise (leg bent at 90 degrees) machine. Do one warmup set & then one set to failure in the same fashion. That's the end of the calf workout.

Now try to hold the clutch pedal down in the car at lights! You'll kangaroo the car all the way home.

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paulo

cheers will give a try

Nine Pack

remember to go heavy enough on the failure set to hit failure at 8-10 reps. At that slow tempo, it will be less than your normal calf failure weight. A little trial & error initially & you'll find the groove, then just progress from there. Enjoy.

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paulo

tried tonight after 5 sets of squats-better ,sore must have been doing explosive reps

coco

gony try this, my calfs are shocking, desperate to get some size on them this year.

SportDr

I got good calf size from squats and presses as the calf is a knee flexor also plus I utilised a routine of 75's, basically doing sets of a weight that will take you to no more than 25 reps in one set, repeating the sets until you reach 75, no matter how many sets it takes! This gives me serious DOMS for days.

As Ninepack said, they are a carthorse and can take serious punishment, when jumping they can take 5-10 times your bodyweight!! and do it multiple times, for example when running. As such the fibres respond well to high reps.

SD

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Nine Pack

SD, the fact that they can take high volume work means that in order to stimulate noticeable growth, they need a different stimulus than the high volume work if we want them to adapt & change. In the past, I have tried the 'set of 100, however long it takes' method & yes, I was very sore but got no growth. I found that utilising a seriously slow contraction, using a very heavy load got a far better response. The volume of sets & reps is very low indeed, but the loading & actual time under tension is massively increased compared to even a set of 100.

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Stanco

Agree 100%. Slow, hard intense reps are needed to make the calves grow. My ****ing teacher failed me last week because i didn't write "30 reps" for calves in an exercise program i had to write :crazy:

Nine Pack

Who's your teacher? I take it you are on a course fro a fitness qualification of some sort?

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Bulldozer

I totally agree with everything thats been said, would just like to add that IMO if you wanna put on 2 inches on your calfs you need to increase overall body mass/ size.

I cant see you adding 2 inches to them without putting on maybe 20 lbs atleast of bodyweight.

Squats and deads to build overall mass, train your calfs as nine pack suggets and your good to go

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paulo

im intending to put at leat a stone on gradual-as dont want too much fat,reluctant to deadlift tho as had disk bother before and recurred when tried to deadlift again!,after physio etc back squatting real strict, **** and legs getting big

bassline boy

there a stuburn muscle just like forarms i find that doing the ed or eod works a treat well it does for me anyway,gotta hit the hard from every angle i once read about mad mike madaratzo(dont know how to spell that lol)he said let the heals almost touch the ground when doing any sort of raises for the best growth his calfs were sick!!

SportDr

I can see your logic there definately, and I do a mixture of the two to keep my calves guessing as they adapt to the high reps pretty fast! As with any programme, variety is key.

SD

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Stanco

Yeah i am. He's a pretty smart guy and has a good physique and i normally agree with him on most subjects, but i don't agree with him at all on ultra high reps on abs and calves because they are "slow twitch" muscles.