Working Calves

[chinaboy]

Despite your training routine for calves don't underestimate stretching to grow a muscle. Maybe not grow as in build new tissue but stretching frequently allows the muscle to grow as the fascia is not binding the muscle tight. You know stretching increase muscle length, blood flow and recovery. The majority of the population has horribly tight calves and this can effect above the calf as far as kenetic chain and joint allignment resulting in other overuse injuries over time. But try stretching you calves any way you can think of an make a routine. Slowly increase you calf flexibility as you progress with you increase training routine and I bet this will help. Even foam rolling and massage would do similar. Good luck.

Some stretches I do are:
Standing with balls of feet on stair and letting heels drop. Keep your knees nearly straight and you pelvis under your upper body and not sticking out. Feet should be pointed straight like on skis. Hold for a while, 30 seconds to 3 minutes. This elongates you gastroc. Do the same strecht one foot at a time with a little knee bend to stretch the solius a little better.

Pull your leg behind you like stretching the quad but try and focus pulling the front of your foot and stretch the tibialis.

Also stretch your hams as well as the share the same back yard as you calves. Touching your toes type of movements.

 

[Pinkton]

reason being.....i would destroy my calves and they never grew.


until......i was squatting 400, 500, 600lbs weekly.
did they really grow....to the point i no longer needed to train them.


point being......i bet a dollar that your calve size
is within reasonable proportion to the rest of your leg.

Yeah, unless you have really really shitty genetics calves will usually grow in line with your legs. I have pretty huge legs and my calves grow linear with them despite having small calves all my life

 

[2swole79]

I don't have "great calves by any means, but as others said they are one of the toughest bodyparts for most to "bring up" if you weren't born with good calves, you probably aren't likely to build great ones. Mosdt guys with amazing calves generally had pretty good calves to start with. I found for myself , focusing on pumping them up with blood and more frequency combined with deep stretching both between but also during sets by leetting the wieghts stretch them helped the most...I have seen my brothers calves absolutlely blow up in one year from simply walking on the steepest incline possiblle for 20min post WO as his cardio, a method I believe Dante once suggested to the board, although I'm not 100% sure. But within a year his calves are now his best bodypart, without hitting them with anyhting other than that.

 

[Wynn]

Also use the search function on this board. There is a lot more advice on training than just this thread. We've beaten this horse a lot.


[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcjAzSf9QEw"]Workout for Massive Calves | Preston Noble (HD) - YouTube[/ame]