X3 Calf Raise

Contrary to popular belief, you can grow your calves.

Some people have said in the past, and this is kind of a common weightlifter bodybuilder myth, that if you want great calves, you should be born with great calves. This is not true.

I actually thought it was true for a while. I never really had calves. And now it looks like somebody glued a ribeye on the back of my lower legs. There are some things that have been seen in traditional training that were considered very correct. So higher repetitions with the calves, your calves are basically contracting all day long, so that kind of makes sense.

The body responds to lower weight and higher repetitions. Also, you’ve probably done the deadlift first or another exercise that would exhaust your grip. So it’s much better to do it with a lighter band and higher repetitions, of course, slow and controlled. You want to make sure that you’re in a safe position. You do not want the band to be midfoot, like some of the other movements.

You want the balls of your feet over the band channel in the plate. That way, the center of your body is really focused on the balls of your feet. You may catch your reflection in a mirror, or if you see a video of yourself doing it, you’ll notice that you’re almost pitched slightly forward to compensate for the fact that your weight is on the balls of your feet.

As I said, use a slightly lighter X3 band, and you will succeed with this. You’ll be shocked at how much calf growth you can have.

Here, Alex is demonstrating the setup for the calf raise. She doubles the band on the ground and then places the ground plate over the top, then hooks the bar to the band.

The ball of the foot should be centered directly over the band channel, and the band should be aligned near the middle of the band channel.

Sometimes the band splits up if you’re using a smaller one, but just have it near there. So you want the heels hanging off the back of the ground plate. The heels should not touch the ground plate during the movement.

You’re gonna be moving up and down, but you don’t wanna relax at the bottom. So you wanna keep constant tension, like with every other movement.

You’ll see that as soon as Alex can no longer reach the peak point of contraction, she’s going to fatigue. So she starts limiting her range of motion and goes through the diminishing range process until complete fatigue is reached.