6 Mistakes You're Making With Calf Raises — and How to Make Them More Effective

Calves are notoriously hard muscles to grow. So much so that in 2020, more than $1 million was spent on calf augmentation surgeries, according to a report from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. That's less than was spent on breast augmentations or nose jobs, but it isn't zero.

If your goal is to train your lower legs into sleek, diamond-shaped calves without going under the knife, you're probably doing calf raises. If you're feeling a bit frustrated about your lack of gains, you could be making one or more of these seven mistakes. Fix them with these simple solutions, and you'll get more strength and size in your calf muscles.

Quick anatomy lesson: Your "calf" isn't just one muscle. It's a complex of several muscles that makes up your lower leg, including your gastrocnemius and soleus. If you're only doing one kind of calf raise, you're only optimally training one of these muscles.

"A standing, straight-leg calf raise hits, primarily, more of the gastrocnemius," says Glenn Higgins, a Surrey, England-based personal trainer. But a bent-leg, seated calf raise includes more of the soleus muscle, as bending the knee largely "turns off" the gastrocnemius, he says.

Many people program their calf raises for late in their workouts (see mistake 6 on this list), so they're in a rush to get out of the gym. As a result, they rush the exercise and don't do the full range of motion, says Tatiana Lampa, a corrective exercise specialist and fitness coach in New York and founder of Training with T.

"Most of them emphasize the upward phase, but should really bring the heel down to get the full benefits of the range of motion," she says. "Some people also don't come full up from their heels, again making the range of motion smaller."

Sacrificing range of motion lessens the contraction of the muscle you're trying to train. You're also reducing the amount of time that the calves are contracting, says Jared Meacham, PhD, CSCS, a fitness professional in Silver Spring, Maryland.

"The science is pretty mixed on 'time under tension,'" he says. The traditional strategy of "time under tension" says that the longer a muscle is being strained — through more or longer reps — the more it will grow. Though certain muscles grow faster with faster reps, the calves respond well to more time under tension with slow, controlled reps, Meacham says.

One more reason not to rush: If you do calf raises too fast, you may not be training your calves for strength and size at all, Arent says.

"The calves — and the Achilles — are very good at the stretch reflex. The calf is built to recoil. That's why they're so important to the vertical jump," he says. "If you're bouncing through the range of motion, you could be doing more to activate the stretch reflex than working the muscle."

The soleus is mostly type I, or "slow-twitch," muscle fiber, according to a May 2016 article in ‌Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Developmental Biology‌.

This means the muscle fibers primarily use fat as their fuel, and they're endurance muscles that can be used for a long time without tiring.

There's good reason for that: You're using your calves with every step you take. If they tired out too easily, walking would be a much bigger challenge. That means, to train them, you need to tire them out.

There can be two very polarized approaches to training your calves, Arent says. One side of the argument says "heavy, hard, bang those suckers because they're so fatigue resistant … you need to expose them to heavy weight because that's not what they're used to," while the other side says "type I fibers tend to respond better to more high-volume work, so we need reps reps reps."

So what's best? A mix.

Especially if you're calf raising with a heavy weight, it can be easy to cheat the exercise — without even noticing.

"If I'm not thinking about what I'm doing, I can easily start to move the weight with other muscles — my hip flexors can do most of the work, and I won't even realize it," Meacham says. The calves are relatively small muscles, and there are much bigger muscles throughout the leg. If those big ones take over, you're not really training the calves any more.

"It's not a case of just getting from A to B in the movement. You need to know how you are getting there, and feel that the correct muscles are firing," Higgins says.

When trying to increase the size of a muscle, focusing your attention on the contraction of that muscle can help it grow.

In a small March 2018 study in the ‌European Journal of Sport Science‌, a handful of untrained college students who focused on contracting the target muscle — getting a good squeeze — saw double the growth in that muscle over eight weeks of training compared to a group that focused on simply lifting the weight.

The calves are made up of very tight, dense muscle fibers. "These [types of fibers] respond really well to peak contraction [aka the squeeze]," Meachum says.

In many ways, this makes sense: You don't want to tire out your calves if you're going to need them for bigger movements where they're also activated, like lunges, squats and step-ups. But if you're hoping for calf growth, leaving them for last can hinder your gains in two ways, according to Meachum:

1. You become more likely to skip the exercise.
2. Your body may not have the materials it needs to perform full contractions.

"It's a worry from an acid-base standpoint. Lactic levels are up, hydrogen levels are up. The contractions aren't going to be as good … so the stress on the calf isn't good enough to elicit any kind of growth," he says.