Unilateral Calf Raise

Muscles involved:

Calves:

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

1. Stand with the ball of your foot on an elevation and find a point to hold onto with your free hand to maintain your balance. Your leg is almost straight. Your other foot extends slightly backward.
2. Lower yourself slowly until you feel an almost complete stretch in the Achilles tendon.
3. Push yourself up as far as possible.

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 consider a few properties of the gastrocnemius and the soleus. These properties determine the effectiveness of different calf exercises. One of the most important differences is between exercises with (nearly) 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 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 above. The gastrocnemius therefore crosses two joints: the ankle and the knee. This means that the possible contribution 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 partly shortened. If you push off with the foot from that position (plantar flexion), the muscle can no longer produce maximum effort. The opposite happens when the leg is straight and you point your toes toward your face. The gastrocnemius is then overstretched and unable to produce maximum effort.

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

Feet pointing straight forward

EMG measurements show that it is best to keep the feet pointing forward. Therefore, do not point your toes inward or outward. Pointing the toes outward appears to reduce the activation of both the medial and lateral heads of the gastrocnemius by almost 10%. Pointing the toes inward has this effect only on the medial head of the gastrocnemius.

Pointing the feet straight forward produces the highest activation of both heads of the gastrocnemius

Train heavy or light?

The soleus, which lies deeper than the gastrocnemius, can be considered the workhorse of the calves, responsible for prolonged but low-intensity efforts such as remaining 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, making up between half and three-quarters of all its muscle fibers.

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

Performing more repetitions and training with lighter weight targets the largest number of muscle fibers in the calf muscles. For most people, performing the exercise with only body weight on one leg also falls into this category.

• Calf press
• Standing calf raise machine
• Smith machine calf raise
• Standing calf raises