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do neone of u bros have an incredible success story of how u had tiny calves and now u have huge calves? i try so hard to get even a little meat on my calves and I CANT. my 16" biceps are bigger then them, so to neone that has a good work out could u help! thnx
mine seem to take alot of time to develop..
train them hard..
do heavy sets 4-6 reps to failure on them
and throw in 6-8 to failure sometimes
Hit them first when you do leg day or whenever you do your calves...And go till failure, mine respond well to heavy weight...mix it up with seated and standing raises
I'll give you an idea as to what I do. It seems to be doing the trick for me so far.
4 sets of seated calf raises x 40 reps. (Load the machine with as much weight that you can do. Start lifting and don't start to count the reps until you feel a burn. Once it starts to burn start counting.........good luck cause it hurts like a bitch)
4 sets of Standing calve raises x 40 reps. (same thing as seated)
4 sets of toes presses (using leg press) x 30 (only reason I say thirty is because they are fried by the time I get to this exercise.....forget about waiting till you feel the burn before counting on these.........it should hurt right after the first few anyway).
Good luck pointing your toes for the next couple of days after. :)
I have calf problems too! i think it all depends on the muscle fibers you have...if your calf is mostly slow twitch, then jogging and running makes them big...if its fast twitch, then heavy weights moderate-low reps is the answer. How to know? Well, I did treadmill everyday for 3 months (running on my toes for extended periods of time no less, to really target the calves) and nothing happened....then i started doing heavy (for me that means 15-25 reps) on a cycle and they grew by an inch....its a hit and miss, trial and error kinda thing but u gotta do it!
i think calfes are all about constant stress. Since its the fast muscle to heal it can be done every other day so do it atleast 3 to 4 times a week before you do anything in the gym and it will stimulate growth
Calf raises...heavy sets , 6-8 reps. Also, throw in sets of 15-20 reps. Mine were PATHETIC. And now they're on the way to looking like I have a football implanted in them. :) According to Arnold, since calves are made up of mainly fast-twitch muscle fibers, they need higher reps to grow. A friend of mine would do 3 sets of 100 reps, and he says his calves have grown like mad. Got the sick-ass veins and all....Good luck bro,
--Hoss
Here's my advice...since everyone seems to have their own...my calves have responded best when stimulated a couple different ways. I don't buy into the ED or EOD training theory...but...
I work my calves 2 days/week. One is heavy weights, moderate (6-10) reps - i usually pyramid the weight up, decreasing reps as I go. I do both seated raises and standing raises (usually done on a SM for standing...i just like it better). (side note: i don't do calves the same day that I've done legs - i like to split it more)
On the second day, i do a plyometric workout to stimulate those fast-twitch fibers...
My calves (although somewhat due to genetics) have responded greatly when I started hitting them this way.
I don't start counting until I start to feel the burn. Your gastrocnemius ( calves ) are a higher density muscle as your forearms and require harder work.
I concluded that good calves are genetic. I have tried endlessly to get those suckers to grow but nothing ever seems to work. Until recently. Well not exactly but my current system of training calves is boosting the best improvements to date. Basically all I been doing is following DC's style training. It goes as follows:
I start with 4 plates total on the leg press machine as a warmup set. I hold at the top for a good 10 secs, go down slowly and hold at the bottom for 5 slow secs. Thats one set. I usually do around 10 for my first set. Now to my rest-pause, working set. With the same weight I do as many reps as possible (with good form it usually amounts to 10-12 reps). I rack it, count 12 secs and rep out as many more as I can (at this point the pain really starts to kick in). After doing another 6-8 reps, I rack it again and count 12 secs. Then finally I bang out as many as possible (usually not many if you do them correctly) with the 10 sec hold at top and 5 sec hold at bottom. You should now have trouble walking out of the gym after your done.
You can pick three different exercises to rotate around and make sure to hit calves twice a week.
And the most important part of all this is to try to beat your max number of reps for a particular exercise. So find your max number of standing calves and try to beat it next time you do standing calves.
PS To get more info on this method, just so a search on doggcrapp. Awesome stuff!
Good Luck,
~US~