Welcome to the training expert Q&A section for March 2007. Each month we take a training question from the forum or one recieved via email and answer it in detail here. Would you like to get your question answered in next months issue? Simply register for free at the forum and post it up! All good questions will get answered here. This month's training question is below:

March Training Question:

How can I make my calves grow?

Answer:

Firstly the calf muscles are predominantly slow twitch muscle fibers, due to the constant low intensity loads of standing and walking. The muscles of the calves are the gastronemius and the soleus. The gastronemius is what we refer to as the calf muscle; the soleus is the muscle that goes down the outside of the calf to the bottom of the lower leg. Your choices of exercises should be either bent leg or standing, but for growth of these stubborn muscles you must do both. The exercise; standing calf raise is a single joint exercise that predominantly targets the gastronemius (inner and outer head) with the soleus also contributing slightly. A bent leg action as we see in the seated calf exercise activates and challenges the soleus (in the seated position tension on the gastronemius is greatly reduced due to the fact that the muscle is no longer in the stretched position).

So to train the calves we should employ set-and-rep schemes as we don’t know what proportion of fast and slow twitch fibers are within our calves and have to rely on training tactics to stimulate and activate as many different fibers as possible. So ideally you should do 1-2 heavy sets that work the fast twitch fibers and then 2-3 sets lighter weight and higher rep sets (always after the heavy sets) that emphasize the slow twitch fibers. Calves seem to recover from training more quickly than larger body parts, as so we can train them more often. The order of training, doing standing first then seated is the normal way to train the calves but should be changed often to stress the calf muscles in a different way.

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About Doug Lawrenson:

Doug Lawrenson is our resident diet guru & fitness over on the Muscle&Strength Forum. Doug has had experience as a bodybuilder, coach and judge at national competition level. If you have questions for Doug or need some advice you can chat to Doug on the forum. Doug is on the forum almost every day!

Doug has written some in-depth and informative articles that have been featured on Muscle&Strength.com. To read some of his articles, check out the diet & nutrition articles section of this this website.