The Problem with Bodyweight Calf Muscle Exercises & Why the Calf Muscles are so Important
+New Brutal yet Quick, Fun & Easy at Home Calf Muscle Workout in About 60-Seconds
Getting a good calf muscle workout with bodyweight exercises has some major drawbacks. But late last year I was inspired to create a new calf exercise that solves all of these problems.
But before I get into the problems we should discuss why we should even bother with calf training in the first place. I think you might be surprised how important it is to have strong calf muscles beyond the aesthetic appeal.
Why Training the Calf Muscles is so Important (At Least 15 Reasons)
I wish I had known this sooner.
Did you know that having a strong calf muscle can prevent quite a few injuries that are more common as you get older? Likely because your calf muscles are getting weaker from neglect.
In my case I might have prevented about a year of suffering with plantar fasciitis. That was almost a full year where I could not run without making my heal pain worse. And a year of very slow walking.
Plus a year of doing loads of foot exercises to try and heal the problem. I had a whole routine that took me about 10-minutes to complete. Yes I was doing several different calf exercises as part of these foot exercises.
In short, it took a lot of time and effort to heal. Time and effort that I might have been able to completely avoid with about a minute’s worth of exercise per day.
Because in all honesty I have mostly ignored the development of my calf muscles previously.
Here’s a list of potential injuries that could be prevented by having a strong calf muscle.
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Preventable injuries with good calf strength
There are many injuries that can be prevented if you have decent calf strength. Some of these include:
Calf tears and strains
Sprained ankles
Plantar fasciitis
Medial Tibial Stress Syndrome (shin splints)
Patellofemoral Pain
Tendinopathies of the ankle and foot
Tendinopathies of the knee
Stress Fractures
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And…
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They (calf muscles) act to stabilise you ankles and feet, preventing your feet from rolling inward (pronating) or outward (supinating). Keeping the biomechanics of the lower limb in line is incredibly important for walkers, preventing hip, knee, ankle and foot disorders.
https://cambridgeosteopathy.co.uk/2019/05/20/the-importance-of-strong-calf-muscles/
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But there are other benefits to having strong calf muscles as well.
Run Faster
Run Longer
Jump Higher
Increased Athleticism
Walk Longer
Greater Stability While Standing and Exercising
Repairs a fallen arch or flat foot
As for the fallen arch I experienced this myself. While I was doing all of the foot exercises to heal my plantar fasciitis I noticed that my former fallen arch as not fallen anymore. And I’ve had that problem since being a teenager.
So yes it is quite possible to fix a fallen arch or flat feet. And strong calf muscles have a lot to do with it.
The Problems with Bodyweight Calf Muscle Exercises
Starting way back in 2004 I created one of my earliest body weight fitness programs, the Lightning Speed Fitness Program.
It sold really well and it was all about getting fit by using your own body weight. It was all about minimalism. Least amount of time and effort for the best results.
The problem is the program really didn't have a great exercise for the calf muscle.
And since 2004 I have a lot more experience with body weight exercises or calisthenics. I have also learned several other forms of exercise like isometrics that require no equipment.
In that time I have experimented with quite a few different types of calf exercises but they all had their limitations in terms of building the calf muscles and doing so quickly.
Obviously you can do body weight calf raises. You can even do them while standing on the edge of a step to get a full range of motion. But the problem with those is that it is hard to create enough weight just with your own bodyweight. This means you have to do a lot of repetitions to get a decent workout in. And that of course lengthens the workout. And you can’t develop super strong calves with low resistance exercises. You need heavy weights or some form of heavy resistance.
However, doing one leg at a time does make the weight a lot heavier. But once you get strong enough on the one legged calf raises you'll have to keep on increasing how many calf raise repetitions you do to continue to grow. Not so with the exercise I'm going to show you below.
Either way you need to spend quite a bit of time if you want to get good results. And it helps to have a staircase nearby. For me, since I don't have stairs in my home, that requires putting on my shoes and going outside. So it takes extra time that I'd rather not waste.
And there are other calf exercises that don’t require weights or machines.
One exercise that is supposed to really build up your calf muscles is running sprints uphill backwards. I did those for a time but got out of the habit. It's a lot of work and takes a lot of repetitions to get any good results in building up calf muscle size. Compared to about 60 seconds of exercise… backwards hill sprints takes a LOT more time and effort. We're talking for at least 15 or 20 minutes. And you need a hill nearby. Plus all the time just to get to the hill.
And compared to this new exercise the backwards hill sprints just don’t come anywhere close to being as good as this new exercise.
Last year I started doing calf exercises on my trampoline to help fully heal my plantar fasciitis injury. That helped a ton with my plantar fasciitis (which I no longer have thank God) but doing loads of repetitions on the trampoline cannot produce the results of this new calf exercise.
Why?
Because the trampoline calf exercises cannot create nearly as much muscular force, resistance or weight as this new calf exercise I created.
Late last year I was watching some fitness videos and I found this guy who was talking about his especially good calf muscle development. This compared to his struggles with other parts of his body that wouldn't grow much despite a tremendous amount of effort.
He attributed his great calf muscles to the fact that he used to stand on his toes all day long. So yes, you can certainly build up your calf muscles by spending a lot of time walking on your toes.
But do you really want to do that? Who's got time for that? And who wants to go food shopping while walking everywhere on your toes? Funny enough there is a guy on Youtube who did a challenge to walk everywhere on his toes for a week.
Yes it looks freaking strange to passersby. I have tried it myself.
In any case, while watching his video I got an idea (inspired) to try a new calf exercise I had never read about or heard of. An idea for how to do this calf exercise just popped into my head. (Maybe it came from one of my spirit guides.)
It's a very simple exercise but in all of my almost 20 years of research and experience with bodyweight exercises I had never seen this exercise before. And maybe that's because it's not actually a bodyweight exercise. Then again I never saw it in an Isometric exercise program either.
I'm not saying I'm the only person who has figured this out. I suspect that other people have figured this out in the past. It's just that I never read about this kind of exercise. It's not likely in any popular fitness book but I could be wrong.
So I tried it out...
And I could not believe how powerfully it flexed my calf muscles. At times it feels brutal. The squeeze and burn you get is tremendous. I had to be careful at first to avoid cramping up. But after a couple of days your body gets used to it.
Now what was even better was how fast my calf muscles grew in size. This was with about a minute of actual exercise time per day. And absolutely no exercise equipment needed. You can do this exercise almost anywhere.
By the second day I could see a significant increase in my calf muscles. No more skinny calves for me.
I always thought that in order to get this kind of incredible calf workout you would have to use weights and or exercise machines to create extreme tension. However, I found a loophole so that no weights are necessary at all.
Now the best part of this exercise is that the stronger your calf muscle gets, the stronger the resistance you can create. So you will never need weights. With DynaCalf exercise as I call it, it’s like you have infinite weights built into it.
And you can do this exercise just about anywhere. You don't even need steps nor would you want to do them on steps. I usually do them in my bedroom.
The whole exercise takes about 12 to 15 seconds to do from start to finish including set up time. Do four repetitions of it throughout the day and your calf muscles will grow like crazy in 60-seconds or less of total exercise time.
Warning... this will make your calf muscles sore. But again your body gets used to it. And they really don't get overly sore. Of course, if you do 10 or more sets of these per day then yes maybe you would get super sore. I have never done more than 5 sets in a day.
Yet even with this quick and easy exercise I have never seen such rapid growth in the calf muscles without using something like a…
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