A lot of bodybuilders will spend hours on end doing leg presses, squats and deadlifts because they want to build bigger leg muscles and ensure that their whole body is in proportion.
However many casual gym goers, and this applies to a lot of women in particular, just want to develop their calf muscles so that their legs are a little more shapely and look a lot better in a pair of shorts.
So in this article I thought I would discuss a very easy way that you can develop bigger calves, and the best thing of all is that you don’t have to do lots of different exercises.
In my experience you can develop impressive calf muscles just by doing one simple exercise – the standing calf raise, which is demonstrated here:
The good thing about this exercise is that it is very easy to incorporate into your regular training program. That’s because all you need is a pair of dumbbells or a barbell.
So once you have finished doing a few dumbbell curls, for example, or have just finished doing some bench presses, you can simply use these weights to do 10-20 reps (or more) of the standing calf raise.
Your calf muscles are very strong because they are worked on a daily basis when you are walking around, so it is better to use a barbell because you need to use a lot of weight to see them grow.
If you do this particular exercise 2-3 times a week or whenever you work out, you should start to see some impressive results (particularly if you do multiple sets each time), and you should find that it is not particular time-consuming or taxing because you can knock them out in no time at all.
The one final thing that I would add is that I don’t really recommend that you stand on a weight plate or any kind of household object to make this exercise harder, like in the video, because this could be very dangerous if you are using heavy weights and suddenly lose your balance. You can get perfectly good results just doing a standard calf raise with your feet on the floor.
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