Calf raise

What it is

Stand with your feet about hip width and rise onto the balls of your feet, lifting your heels as high as they will go. Pause at the top. Lower under control.

Standing on a step with the heels hanging off the back adds range at the bottom, which is a real increase in the work done.

Doing it on one leg roughly doubles the load and needs no equipment at all — worth knowing, because the calf tolerates a lot and two-legged bodyweight raises stop being challenging quickly.

What it demands

Ankle plantarflexion strength, and balance, and very little else.

The detail that makes this movement interesting is the knee:

• Knee straight — gastrocnemius is at a good working length and contributes strongly, alongside soleus.
• Knee bent — gastrocnemius crosses the knee, so bending it slackens the muscle and takes most of it out. Soleus does the work.

That is not gym folklore; it follows directly from gastrocnemius originating above the knee and soleus below it. A seated calf raise is the bent-knee version and it trains soleus.

What usually goes wrong

Bouncing. Using the elastic recoil of the calcaneal tendon to rebound at the bottom. It moves more weight and does less.

Partial range at the top. Not getting all the way up onto the toes is the most common way the movement gets short.

Holding on and pulling. Using a wall for balance is sensible; using it to help lift yourself is not.

Only ever doing the straight-knee version. That trains the visible half of the calf and much less of the larger one underneath.

Where it sits

An isolation movement, which makes it unusual in a collection mostly made of patterns — but the calf is loaded surprisingly little by squatting and hinging, so it is one of the few places isolation earns its keep in a basic programme.

It also has an unusually clear mechanism behind its variations, which makes it a good illustration of why knowing where a muscle attaches changes what you do.