Calf Raises

Muscles involved:

Calves:

• Soleus
• Gastrocnemius
• Plantaris (not present in everyone)

When training the calves, you can use the following rule of thumb:

Bent legs train the soleus. Straight legs also engage the gastrocnemius.

When training the calves, you should mainly take into account a few characteristics of the gastrocnemius and the soleus. These characteristics determine the effectiveness of the different calf exercises. One of the most important differences is between exercises with (almost) straight legs and exercises with bent knees.

The soleus crosses only the ankle joint. Therefore, it does not matter to the soleus whether the knee is bent or straight.

The gastrocnemius consists of two muscle heads that end in the same attachment as the soleus: the Achilles tendon, which crosses the ankle joint. However, both heads attach to the thigh bone higher up. The gastrocnemius therefore crosses two joints: the ankle and the knee. This means that the possible involvement of the gastrocnemius can be influenced by bending or straightening the leg.

With the leg straight and the foot at a normal angle (as when standing), the gastrocnemius can produce maximum force. When the leg is bent, the gastrocnemius is already partially shortened. If you want to push off with the foot from that position (plantar flexion), the muscle can no longer exert maximum effort. The opposite happens when the leg is straight and you point your toes toward your face. The gastrocnemius is then overstretched to produce maximum effort.

If you want to train the calves as completely as possible with a single exercise, you should do this with (almost) straight legs.

Feet pointed straight forward

EMG measurements show that it is best to keep the feet pointed forward. Therefore, do not point the toes inward or outward. Pointing the toes outward appears to reduce the engagement of both the inner and outer parts of the gastrocnemius by almost 10%. Pointing the toes inward has this effect only on the inner part of the gastrocnemius.

Pointing the feet straight forward results in the highest activation of both heads of the gastrocnemius

Train heavy or light?

The soleus (located deeper than the gastrocnemius) can be considered the workhorse of the calves, handling prolonged but low-intensity efforts such as standing upright and walking. The soleus can therefore consist of up to 90% slow-twitch muscle fibers.

The gastrocnemius also contains many slow-twitch muscle fibers: from half to three-quarters of all muscle fibers.

You can train the fast-twitch muscle fibers by training explosively and/or heavily. You then also target the muscle fibers with greater growth potential. However, you also target a relatively low number of muscle fibers.

Doing more repetitions and training with lighter weight targets the largest number of muscle fibers in the calf muscles.

• Calf press
• Dumbbell standing calf raise
• Smith Machine Calf raise
• Standing calf raises