Pumping calf muscles – Tips from Arnold
Published August 12, 2011 | 
Pumping calf muscles – Tips from Arnold
There is a lot of confusion around training the calves. Not less than around press. How many repetitions to do? Many? Few? How often to train? At what rate? And etc. As for me, there are no white spots in this point. The truth was installed on my own experiences. And do not argue with me!
Weight load.
When I started to compete, many pointed the finger at my calves: they said, quite weak. I saw it and thought that I had no luck with calves and that it is my genetic deficiency. And somehow I went to the very south of Africa to get mind from my idol, the famous Reg Park. We have begun to exercise together and I complained about the weakness of my calves. In those days, I weighed somewhere 115 kg, and Park said that I had no hope to pump my calves on conventional simulators. They supposedly give quite the wrong load. I was surprised, because the maximum weight of a traditional stimulator is about 250 kg. Is not that enough? Park has explained that the stimulating load on any leg muscles, including calves, must exceed a minimum of three times your body weight. He led me to “enhance” stimulator in his home gym. There the load was twice as high and was 500 kg! And what do you think? In a month of training my calves increased by 2.5 cm! So here’s my advice: multiply your body weight by 3 and you get the best load for the calves. This recommendation is hardly suitable for beginners but for advanced and elite it is just right!
The frequency of training.
The foundation of league achievements is the regularity of training. Many of those pumping the calves do not have enough patience. But if you have it in abundance, it remains to find out how many times a week you should be trained. To this question I can answer with apothecary precision. The fact is that during my competitive career, I had rigorous training diaries. Now I just open a diary, then another, and add some figures. If we assume a starting point the very first training session in the status of the pros, then for the creation of bulk calves it took me 500 hours of training. It is 660 workouts with the duration of 45 minutes.
Since I’ve had four such trainings a week, it is easy to see the total length of the way: more than 3 years! Not even hope to cut the corner! I consider myself a genetically gifted athlete. Most of you, my readers, need much more time!
Amplitude. The longer, the better. Whatever exercise you do! There is only one exception: a technique of partial repetitions. At every fourth calf workout I did every repeat only for half or even for a quarter of the amplitude. The weight, of course, I greatly increased. Such a “hit” on the calves responded with strong stimulation of growth of their masses!
How many repetitions?
I usually did 5 sets of an exercise and changed the number of repetitions for each workout. Let’s say today I did 10 reps per set. At the next workout the number of repetitions increased to 12-15. There were days when I did only 3-4 repeats, and sometimes Tom Platz visited me during my workout. He always trained the same way: doing a set of 30, 40 and 50 repeats. To prove that I was no less tough, I had to repeat all his freaks. It turned out that I have always trained differently. But this is the key to success. Monotony is the enemy of the muscle growth! If you’re, like I used to be, not satisfied with your calves, take my experience. It involves a long and very difficult road, but in the final you will get the same calves, as I have. However, the same people do not exist. You’ll be better!
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