How to Build Big Calves: The Best Exercises, Workout Plan, and Complete Guide

Building big calves is notoriously difficult. For some people, massive calves are a birthright. For the rest of us, they refuse to grow no matter how many calf raises we throw at them, with even pro bodybuilders struggling to get them to expand.

The good news is that everyone can build bigger calves, even if you’re currently rocking a pair of ankles that seem to go all the way up to your knees. But you have to stop training them like an afterthought.

In this article, you’ll learn how, with the best exercises, technique tips, and a proven workout routine.

Know Your Enemy (Calf Anatomy 101)

I’m going to be brief and straight to the point here, so it won’t feel like you’re in med class. But to understand the exercises I’ll go through later, you’ll want to know what you’re actually training.

Your calf is more than a homogeneous blob of meat; you’re looking at two different primary muscles: the gastrocnemius and the soleus. Together, they are called the triceps surae (your arm isn’t the only body part sporting a triceps muscle).

Gastrocnemius

This is the muscle that creates the width and the size of the upper part of the lower leg. It looks a little like a diamond and is your primary power generator for running and jumping.

The gastrocnemius crosses the knee joint and is most active when your legs are straight. If you bend your knees, it goes slack and partially checks out of the conversation.

Soleus

The soleus hides underneath the gastrocnemius, like a flat old flounder. Even though it’s partially hidden and you can’t see it properly, it pushes the gastrocnemius out and makes your calves look wider and thicker when you build it bigger.

The soleus does not cross the knee and does more of the work when your knees are bent. It’s a workhorse, containing mostly slow-twitch muscle for work that requires more endurance.

Both muscles merge at the bottom to form the Achilles tendon. It attaches your calf muscles to your heel bone (called the calcaneus) and works like a giant spring to propel you forward.

Bonus Muscles: Plantaris and Tibialis Anterior

The plantaris is a tiny muscle with a long tendon running between the gastrocnemius and soleus. Funny enough, only 80–90% of the population have one in the first place. If you’re one of the chosen ones, it just helps the other two slightly, and you don’t need to train it specifically to build big calves.

The tibialis anterior is at the front of your lower leg and pulls your toes up toward your face (dorsiflexion). It’s generally not a limiting factor for calf size, and not everyone needs to train it with dedicated exercises.

If you want complete calf development, you have to treat them like a prioritized muscle group and attack them with plenty of heavy and hard sets, and from all angles (both straight and bent knees). They aren’t going to grow because you did three half-hearted sets at the end of leg day.

The Best Exercises to Build Big Calves

For many lifters, the calves are the most stubborn, insultingly difficult muscle group to grow.

That doesn’t mean that you need a dozen exercises from every imaginable angle. Don’t overcomplicate a muscle group that basically does one thing: points your toes down.

Forget fiddling about with foot positions (pointing toes in or out changes activation a bit) for now. Don’t worry about it until you have built the mass.

You need simple, effective exercises. And you need to train your calves harder than you probably ever have before.

Stick to these staples.

1. Standing Calf Raise

The standing calf raise is the classic mass builder and the exercise that most effective calf workouts are built around.

You can do them in many ways, from a dedicated calf machine, a Smith or hack squat machine, or with a dumbbell in one hand. Your equipment doesn’t matter much. What matters is that 1) you can load the exercise properly, and 2) it allows you to do it with a long range of motion.

Keep your knees straight (but not hyper-locked). Squeeze at the top for a second, lower slowly, and pause at the bottom. And I mean really pause at the bottom. Get a nice stretch before you press the weight up again, without any bouncing. The bottom half of the calf raise is the part where most of the growth happens.

At the end of a set, when you can’t do any more full reps, you can continue doing half reps in the bottom half, again getting that full stretch.

How to Do Standing Calf Raises

1. Place your toes and the ball of your feet on the foot support. Place the shoulder pads against your shoulders and stand upright in the starting position.
2. Lower yourself down by bending your ankles in a controlled movement.
3. Push yourself up by extending your ankles.
4. Repeat for reps.

2. Seated Calf Raise

The seated calf raise is your primary soleus builder. The soleus actually works just as hard with straight legs, but bending your knees takes some of the gastrocnemius out of the equation so that you can put more direct stress on the soleus.

Your soleus is active all day long as soon as you stand up and walk around, so it’s extremely fatigue-resistant. There are no studies on this, but almost 40 years of training and 30 years of coaching have told me that they respond to heavy weights (high tension) and higher reps.

So, if you train calves at least twice a week, it can be a good idea to do seated raises once with heavy weights and 5–12 reps and once with lighter weights and 15–30 reps. And again, deep dorsiflexion (ankle bend) and pauses at the bottom.

How to Do Seated Calf Raises

1. Sit down on the seat, and adjust the knee pad to correct height. Place your toes and the ball of your feet on the foot support.
2. Lower the weight by bending your ankles in a controlled movement.
3. Push the weight up by extending your ankles.
4. Repeat for reps.

3. Donkey Calf Raise

If the donkey calf raise was good enough for golden age bodybuilders (you might have seen old black-and-white photos of Arnold with two or three guys sitting on his back), it’s good enough for us.

Actually, donkeys are not just “good enough.” Yes, they are one of the most awkward-looking exercises in the gym, but also one of the best mass builders for your calves.

They’re functionally similar to standing calf raises, but when you bend at the hips, you place your calves in a mammoth muscle-building stretch under load, better than almost any other exercise.

If your gym doesn’t have a donkey machine, you can use a dip belt with plates and stand on a step block, leaning forward on a bench. Or you can have a gym buddy or two sit on your back. This is where the casual gymgoer might stare at you. Let them. You’re building big calves.

How to Do Donkey Calf Raises

1. Stand on a small elevation, such as a weight plate, with your hands/forearms resting on a stable surface, like a bench or machine, and keep your feet together with your hips hinged forward, so you are leaning slightly.
2. Raise your heels as high as possible by pushing up onto your toes and contracting your calf muscles.
3. Lower your heels slowly back to the starting position.
4. Repeat for reps.

4. Leg Press Calf Raise

If your lower back is fried from squats and deadlifts or you don’t want a heavy bar compressing your spine for standing raises, the leg press calf raise is your number one exercise. It might even be the best overall calf exercise of all, depending on your preferences.

It allows for arguably the heaviest loading of any calf exercise: you’re completely stable in the seat and can focus 100% on your calves with zero spinal compression. As with the exercises above, slow the eccentric, pause when you have maximum stretch in your calves, and press the weight up from a dead stop.

Just take care you don’t hyper-extend your knees with a heavy weight (keep an ever so slight knee bend). And make sure the safety stops are in place so you don’t get a quarter ton of weight over you if your feet slip.

How to Do Leg Press Calf Raises

1. Position yourself in the leg press machine, placing the balls of your feet on the lower edge of the platform, with your heels free.
2. Extend your legs without over-extending your knees and maintain slight tension throughout the movement.
3. Allow your toes to drop downward in a controlled motion for a light stretch in the calves, while keeping your heels as the highest point.
4. Press through your toes and push them away from your body for a full contraction of the calf muscles.
5. Slowly return to the starting position and repeat for reps.

Technique Tips and Programming Tips for Building Big Calves

Time for some bad news. Genetics come into play big time when we’re talking calves. Some people have them no matter what they do, while others struggle to grow them (also no matter what they do).

You probably have a friend who has never touched a weight in his life but walks around with bowling-ball calves. And here you are, having done calf raises for a decade but still looking like you’re walking on stilts.

So genetics matter. But at the same time, the “I have bad genetics” spiel is more often than not a cover-up for “I do three bouncy sets at the end of my leg workout and go home.”

The good news? Unless you are an anatomical anomaly or a true genetic outlier, you can make your calves grow.

Here are my best tips for turning your calves into cows.

1. No Bouncing

I often see people doing calf raises and bouncing out of the hole, often even without going all the way down.

Your Achilles tendon is like a very strong spring. It stores energy so it can release it to help you walk and run. If you bounce at the bottom of a calf raise, your tendon is doing 90% of the work, and your muscle is doing 10% (OK, made-up numbers, but you get the idea).

Make sure you come to a dead stop at the bottom of every rep. That way, you dissipate the elastic energy in a stretchy poof and force the muscle to move the weight instead of the tendon bouncing it up.

2. The Wrong Kind of Partial ROM

Training your calves burns, so many people unconsciously shorten the rep range as the sets go on. They stop going all the way down (the essential stretch) and stop going all the way up (the peak contraction).

I want you to actively focus during each rep so you don’t do that. Treat every rep like it’s the only one you’re doing. Get a full stretch at the bottom and a good squeeze at the top.

If you’re going to do partial reps, do them in the bottom half, down to the maximum stretch. That’s actually an effective way to get the calves to grow, as proven in several studies.^{1 2}

You can do partials at longer muscle lengths either early in the sets (you can use more weight than if you did the entire rep range) or you can continue repping out stretched partials once you can’t do any more full reps.

3. High Reps or Heavy Weight?

Yes.

I don’t have any controlled studies to back the following up, only experience and biomechanics. And that’s good enough in my book.

Calves contain a combination of slow- and fast-twitch fibers and experience very high forces all the time, whenever you move around, be it walking, running, or jumping. That very likely raises their “hypertrophy threshold” to coin a term (or not, someone has probably used it before).

What does that mean? It means that 1) sets that feel hard might still be under-stimulating, and 2) I believe many lifters, even experienced bodybuilders, stop their calf sets too early because of the burn, not actual mechanical failure.

My suggestion is to use both: low-rep sets (down to 5–8 reps) and longer sets where you actively force yourself to work through the pain until you physically can’t move the weight. Either in the same workout or split into one heavier and one lighter session. I bet you’ll be surprised at how many more reps you can do, even though your brain tells you to stop, as long as you really try and think about it.

4. Loaded Stretch

If you’ve read your way here, you’ll have seen me talk a bunch about “loaded stretch”. Your calves spend most of their days in mid-range, and even if you’re an athlete, you rarely put them into any kind of loaded stretch for a significant time.

I suggest you take a good, long pause at the bottom of each rep when you train calves. At least a couple of seconds, perhaps up to five. And when you’re in the midst of that set, those five seconds will feel much longer.

You can also experiment with loaded stretch holds (10–30 seconds) at the end of the last set of an exercise. Or even between sets.

There is some evidence that doing so will actually result in extra calf growth, especially in the soleus.³ I’ve used this strategy successfully with clients whose calf size hadn’t budged in a decade (I can’t, unfortunately, isolate that specific factor as the catalyst of growth, as it was always part of a big change in their entire calf routine).

5. Frequency and Volume

For most muscle groups, current exercise science tells us that it doesn’t matter if you train them once, twice, or more times per week, as long as you get the same amount of work done and put in the effort.^{4 5}

But for building big calves, I feel a higher frequency is warranted. Not necessarily because of frequency per se, but because it’s a practical way to accumulate more quality sets over the week without one or two long sessions turning into junk volume.

Even beginners benefit from at least 10 weekly sets for calf growth. For example, in one recent study, 61 untrained women did either 6, 9, or 12 sets of straight-legged calf raises.⁶ After six weeks, 12 sets produced clearly greater hypertrophy than six sets: 12% overall calf growth compared to ~7%. Twelve sets also showed a trend toward more growth than nine.

And that was in untrained women. There are no studies looking into the optimal number of weekly sets of calf raises in well-trained lifters or bodybuilders, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that number were 20 or even more.

And that’s why I think you should train calves at least twice weekly if you’re struggling to grow them. In theory, one workout consisting of 20 sets might work almost as well, but that 20th set will likely be a pretty low-intensity one, thus stimulating less growth.

Even training them 5–6 times a week can be an easy way to rack up more high-quality weekly sets, but you can’t go overboard with per-session volume if you’re going to “survive” that calf onslaught.

6. Toes In, Toes Out?

You’ll often hear that toes straight build overall calves, toes in build the outer calf, and toes out build more inner calf.

But is that true? And if it is, should you care?

The answers are yes and maybe, but probably not.

As you know, if you read the little anatomy part earlier, the two calf heads attach slightly differently at your knee and ankle, and if you rotate your foot, you can change which one takes more or less of the load.

A 2020 study put it to the test with ultrasound, and it turns out toe positioning works. Twenty-two “untrained” (hadn’t been working out for at least four months) young men did toes straight, toes in, or toes out calf raises for nine weeks.⁷ Here’s what happened:

• Inner gastrocnemius: ~8.4% vs. ~3.8% (toes out vs. in).
• Outer gastrocnemius: ~9.1% vs. ~5.5% (toes in vs. out).

Those numbers look mighty impressive (and they are statistically significant), but the absolute differences in actual muscle growth were ~0.08–0.10 cm (~0.03–0.04 inches).

That’s noticeable on ultrasound, but not in real life. And that’s in pretty much untrained lifters. For someone who has been grinding calves for a decade, the differences would be even tinier.

I suggest that you 1) use the position where you feel the strongest contraction, and 2) use the angle that allows you to load the movement hardest through a long range of motion.

For many lifters, I’ve found that a little external rotation (toes a bit out) feels more natural. You can try that as a starting point.

And my point is that if your calves aren’t growing, changing your toe angle won’t fix that.

Calves to Cows Workout Routine

Here, I’m going to present a calf routine that works, provided you do (put in the work, that is).

It consists of three exercises, two with straight legs and one with bent, and with varying rep ranges to hit all muscle fibers.

Try adding this workout twice a week, ideally with at least two days of rest in between, to start. You’ll get 20 weekly sets of calf work, which should be enough to nudge your calves into growth.

If you are an experienced lifter/bodybuilder used to training calves, you can even add a third workout for a total of 30 sets per week. Something like Monday, Wednesday, and Friday/Saturday, or Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday/Sunday.

Exercise	Sets	Reps	Notes
Standing Calf Raise	4	8–12	Go heavy on this one. Pause 2–3 sec at the bottom. No bouncing.
Seated Calf Raise	3	15–20	Focus on the burn. Shorter rest (~60 seconds).
Leg Press Calf Raise	3	20–25	Pick a weight you can do ~15 full reps with. When you reach failure, do 5–10 partial reps in the bottom half.

If you have a donkey calf raise machine, feel free to do that instead of leg press calf raises if you want. The reason donkeys aren’t a default exercise is that those machines are even more rare than big calves, and many people don’t have a workout buddy or don’t want them on their backs.

Every time you enter the gym, try to do a little more than last time. Add a small plate to the bar, move the selector pin on the machine down a notch, or do one more rep. This is progressive overload, and it is the primary catalyst of growth.

And train calves first, no matter what else you train that day. If you save them for last when you are exhausted, you will half-ass it. I know it, you know it. Prioritize them if you want them to grow.

Track Your Calf Training in StrengthLog

This is one of the many free workouts in our workout log app, StrengthLog.

The app makes it super easy to keep track of your weights and reps and ensures you’re on the right path.

It remembers what weights you used in your last session, and automatically loads them into your next one. And trying to improve on your last workout is the number one factor for improving, building muscle, and getting stronger.

Download it and start tracking your gains today!

StrengthLog is free to use, and so is this workout.

A Note on Nutrition

Your training is what makes your muscles grow, but if you don’t give them the energy and nutrients they need, you’ll struggle to get the results you’re after.

This article is all about the training part of building big calves, but I won’t leave you hanging without a few tips on diet as well.

• If you are in a deep caloric deficit, your calves won’t grow. To add actual inches of calf circumference, you need to be eating enough calories and ideally be in a slight caloric surplus. When your muscles have all the energy they need, it’s much easier to trick them into growth.
• Not all calories are equal for building muscle. Carbs and fats give the energy to train hard, but protein is the actual building material. Try to get roughly 2 grams of protein per kg of body weight (around 1 gram per lb) every day.

Final Rep

Look, you can sit around and blame your parents for your high muscle insertions all day, or you can actually do something about it.

If you want to build big calves, you have to force the issue. Hit this workout, follow the tips, and train hard and heavy.

One day, you’ll look down and realize your “Team No Calves” membership card has finally expired.

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Last reviewed: 2025-12-22

References

1. J Strength Cond Res. 2023 Sep 1;37(9):1746-1753. Greater Gastrocnemius Muscle Hypertrophy After Partial Range of Motion Training Performed at Long Muscle Lengths.
2. Eur J Sport Sci. 2025 Aug 24;25(9):e70030. Resistance Training Beyond Momentary Failure: The Effects of Past‐Failure Partials Versus Initial Partials on Calf Muscle Hypertrophy Among a Resistance‐Trained Cohort.
3. PLoS One. 2022 Sep 1;17(9):e0273451. Loaded inter-set stretch may selectively enhance muscular adaptations of the plantar flexors.
4. Sci Med Sport. 2019 Mar;22(3):361-370. Resistance training frequency and skeletal muscle hypertrophy: A review of available evidence.
5. J Sports Sci. 2019 Jun;37(11):1286-1295. How many times per week should a muscle be trained to maximize muscle hypertrophy? A systematic review and meta-analysis of studies examining the effects of resistance training frequency.
6. Int J Sports Med. 29 April 2024. Bigger calves from doing higher resistance training volume?
7. J Strength Cond Res. 2020 Aug;34(8):2347-2351. Different Foot Positioning During Calf Training to Induce Portion-Specific Gastrocnemius Muscle Hypertrophy.