The Heavy-Lifting Workout Routine to Grow Your Calves

You may hate training them, but thick, meaty calves help bring any physique together from the waist down. Also, powerful calves can help you to sprint harder and jump higher, which are useful traits to possess when the zombie apocalypse eventually hits us. (OK, call us crazy, but better safe than sorry…right?)

In the past, a light-weight, high-volume barrage has been considered the right formula to increase the mass of your calves. And considering that the calves—made up of the gastrocnemius and soleus—are worked every time you take a step, climb the stairs, or stand on your tiptoes, it makes sense that they would need a lot of volume for them to respond and grow.

It’s good to change things up, though, especially when the exercise menu doesn’t consist of much more than different variations of calf raises. So, to mix it up, we have you lifting heavy weight, a stimulus your calves probably aren’t used to, in the six-to-10-rep range. If you’ve been following the high-reps-on-calves dogma for years, this heavier, lower-rep workout should serve as some nice shock treatment for an often neglected muscle.