The Exact Calf Raise Progression We Use On World Class Jumpers (Exercises Included)
Up, guys? Welcome back to the THB Strain podcast. My name is John Evans. I can help you jump higher, run faster, and get healthy tendons. This is my business partner, Isaiah Rivera.
john:He is proof of this concept in Yeah.
isaiah:Look at my knees.
john:Look at how health look at those healthy knees.
isaiah:And look how thick this tendon
john:Yeah. Is. Really thick. Very thick tendons.
isaiah:Oh, we got it thick with his help.
john:That's right. And if you're interested in getting my help in getting thicker tendons, then click the link in the description, and you can purchase an annual plan, which is half the price of what you would pay if you did the month to month for a year. Consider So signing up for a year. It takes a while to get better, and we will get into it. Today, I'm inspired to talk about something more scientific.
john:Getting thick Achilles. Thick Achilles. Yes. Because Nick Rossi, my dear friend, I wanna I wanna make fun of him, but I'm gonna be nice. I love Nick, but I love to bust his balls too.
john:So he was saying, like, hey, I, you know, I I really liked it when you guys did more complex topics, so I figured we would do one on progressions for the lower leg, specifically your calf. So why this is relevant? When you jump, it's a triple extensor, one of the triple extensors. It is the final push off, and it is really you taking all the energy that you built up in your approach when your feet hit the ground, transferred into the ground. So it is very important to develop the tendon, the old muscular tennis unit, the muscle, and the tendon, and then also try to get more coordinated with it.
john:So let's talk about, I guess, some of the caveats and differences between a calf raise and a jump because I think that some people might try to is the word conflate? I don't know. Make them the same. They're not the same thing. So I guess I'll turn this over to you.
john:What do you think are the major differences between the push off and a jump and just like a heavy double leg calf raise in your opinion? What does it feel like?
isaiah:In terms of sensation?
john:From a 50.5 inch jumper.
isaiah:I actually don't think a lot about the sensation I feel when I jump. Yeah. I know.
john:Do you feel it ever? Off one, I don't
isaiah:Actually, something that made it go into the forefront of my mind was when I sprained my ankle earlier last year or a few months ago. Yeah. And remember I had to do sessions where I couldn't
john:Plantar flex fully.
isaiah:Plantar flex fully. And that was very, very interesting. And I think it kind of highlighted the difference between my left leg and my right leg. I think the roles that your calf plays and how they and how it feels at each foot Yeah. Like because a different I've I've sprained my my left leg before, like the left ankle, And my jumps were affected way more, like way more than when my Right ankle.
isaiah:Right ankle was. I haven't thought about why that is, but I can basically when I go do a jump session, I cannot fully plantar flex the right and still jump pretty high. If you were to tell me not to plantar flex my left leg, I don't think I could jump very high.
john:Because like Which is interesting. How
isaiah:it feels when I my right foot the best way I can do this, sorry if you're if you're listening to this, but this is what my right foot does or how it feels like
john:Pops off the Boom. Is it like a slapping sensation or like a jab?
isaiah:Let me do a max effort jump real quick. I hesitate to answer that question because I've answered it. People have called me out on there's like an old video where I mentioned it. I think I've described it as a jab. Actually, I used to describe it as a jab, but it's really a punch.
john:Really? Like straight out?
isaiah:A punch a punch at the ground. Yeah.
john:That's what Connor always used to cue, Connor Barth, because he was right left lefty, I think. Right? Yeah. And he used to say he slammed his foot, his block foot into the ground as hard as he possibly can.
isaiah:Yeah. The thing is is I say that, and then when I see people try to apply it, then their block foot's really high up. It's like a punch, but your foot doesn't come too high. Like your foot isn't knee height or at least it shouldn't be and then comes and punches the ground. It's like
john:It's not like a hand
isaiah:made in few inches above the ground and then it punches.
john:It's like a little jab.
isaiah:Yeah. Low jab. And then the left foot, how it feels, it's a roll. Roll and push off. Yeah.
isaiah:Yeah. It's like a a roll. I mean, happens super. I mean, within point three seconds. Yeah.
isaiah:But it's a a roll and then a really hard push. So I would say the left leg feels more like what a calf raise feels like. The right leg would feel like if you do pogo hops, right, if you're like doing, like, jump roping. Think about jump roping, but, like, being very quick off the ground, that's more so with the the right leg as a left right jumper.
john:So for one foot, it definitely it's a roll, and you push off. But when it's really fast, it's a roll, but it just everything's faster. Everything's sped up.
isaiah:Yeah.
john:I definitely feel
isaiah:That's how I feel too.
john:I definitely feel the energy in my Achilles, like, build up. When I have really good one foot jumps, when I have bad one foot jumps, I don't feel that energy, you know, build up and and really climb. I think my best best one foot jumps, I've always said this, like, I kind of stay more upright early on, and then I tend to open up that last stride, which is what we talked about. It's, a big constraint for me. But, yeah, definitely, everything just happens, like, so fast, but it's just it's very forceful, high pressure, intense, like on the ball of my foot.
john:I don't really feel it ever on my heel. Like, it's not like I'm slamming my heel into the floor. It's like I put my foot down and then my hips move over my foot so fast and the push I off happens super
isaiah:will say the higher I'm jumping, the more my left leg is acting like, the more my plant leg is acting like the block foot leg. Yeah. The more the sensations feel different. Like, the best jumps ever, it almost feels like two block foots. Oh.
isaiah:Two block feet.
john:I like that. It's max stiffness. Yeah. Yeah. So it it's very apparent that if you wanna jump high, you need to have really, really high stiffness and very high rate of force development, and you have to do it in a very coordinated manner.
john:So we do this very creatively in the weight room because you're not necessarily gonna get the same sensations in anything that you can really do in here. You might be able to do some unique shock loading with dropping on, like, a seated calf raise or maybe over here on the on the belt squat or with a safety bar, but typically, we're seeking internal biological adaptations to the tissue first. So if you had Achilles tendinopathy, the first thing you need to do is isometrics for that. So pick any exercise that loads the the muscular tennis unit of the calf and Achilles for forty five seconds. Pick a weight where it doesn't hurt.
john:Definitely do it out of compression, so don't be fully dorsiflexed. That would be, like, the first step. Right? Because that can retrain some of the motor neurons to fire more linearly. I've seen that when you have tendinopathy, Jill Cook's research, at least in the knee.
john:So it's relatively safe to assume the same thing happens in the Achilles, but you change the motor control distally in leg, and then you also have nociceptive nerve fibers get more sensitive, so you're going have pain there. So the isometrics function to decrease that pain, then you get the motor control back, and then you're also gonna function to stiffen the tendon because tendons respond to two things, time and tension. Time is long at forty five seconds. Tension is relatively high at about 70%. That tends to be a little bit on the higher side, but I basically do it as a slight burn and try to avoid shaking.
john:So that would be the first step. We would do that every day. And then the next thing we would do is heavy slow strength training for it. So exactly like what we do for the patella before the Achilles, we'd build that in every other day, kinda stacking on top of what we did previously. The base of the pyramid is isometrics.
john:The next stage is every other day, doing heavy cell strength. And then we would get into storing and releasing elastic energy in the form of, like, depth drops. It's not too dissimilar when that's just like a rehab approach that we would do. But when you're actually talking about performance training, we start with essentially volume. So I would have them do double leg or single leg on one of these devices, whether it would be like the seated calf raise or standing standing calf raise Smith machine, depends on what I have access to.
john:Typically, I'll do full range of motion if their Achilles is healthy. If not, I won't. Like, his ankle's kinda pissed off, so we haven't been doing, like, crazy amounts of dorsiflexion. Yeah. And then we'll increase the max strength and increase the intensity over time, so the weights will go up, the reps will go down, the sets will go up.
john:And the reason we do that is because we're trying to get as much tension in there as possible, and motor neurons, the nervous system firing down to the calf, motor recruitment goes way up. Now rate coding is how fast you can essentially release the calcium in and out at the localized site, and that's determined by the nervous system. So at some point, you've got to stop addressing the structure and start addressing the nervous system a little bit. And we get most of that through either jumping, sprinting, or low volume plyos or with the cleans because you want plantar flex.
isaiah:When people say neural drive, is that what neural drive is referring to?
john:Neural drive is, yeah, it's the brain. So it's like your neurons in your brain are all connected. They look like little pieces of spaghetti almost. Yeah. And you have excitatory and inhibitory postsynap postsynapses or something like that, and they move in and out really, really fast in the neuron.
john:And then when you meet a certain threshold, that depolarizes the neuron, and it causes an action potential that moves across all the neurons down to the actual muscle. So high neural drive is how fast those frequencies are happening. So it's like, you know, if you were to push a button really, really quickly, that's what's happening in your brain. I think it's with GABA and there's another one, but then it basically moves it's a cascade all the way down to the muscle, and really, really neurally wired guys would be able to fire a ton of those, basically signals from their brain at super high frequencies.
isaiah:A neural ejaculation, if you will.
john:A neural ejaculation, if you will. Yes. A massive load of electrical and chemical activity. Yeah. So at some point, you've got to train that past just max strength because you need to increase the rate of contraction.
john:And here's the caveat with, like, the triceps surae or what you would call, like, the lower leg, your calf, and and your Achilles is it's functioning in a really unique way when you actually jump. And this is what he was kind of saying in his in his block foot, and even in one foot. It's you're getting this quasi isometric condition or what Rolf would call like dynamic isometric strength or the or, you know, the what does he call it? Where it tighten stretches. Winding filament theory.
john:Winding filament theory, or potentially like that leading into all that energy. It's essentially the concept that the muscle's holding the same length, and the titan in it is stretching, or the tendon is stretching. It's hard to say how much each contributes, but they're very important in getting a ton of energy. And that doesn't happen in the weight room unless you drop really, really fast or you have very, very high loads or both. And that's when you're going to actually get the tendon to deform just a little bit.
john:We're not talking much. I think it's like a few centimeters, like maybe two or three centimeters. But you're going get a ton of energy out of the Achilles or tighten in the muscle as a result. So to train that, you can increase the stiffness of all those tissues, right? And you can train the nervous system to fire those frequencies off faster, but at some point, you've got to connect the dots and a jump.
john:And so what you can do to increase the stiffness is you can do supra maximal concentric work. So essentially, you put more than you could do on the up phase, on the down phase. That would stiffen all those components up really, really well, and you'd get a ton of motor recruitment. But then you've got to do it fast. So that's where you could do speed calf raises.
john:You could do, like, you know I mean, essentially, you're loading the eccentric phase really, really quickly, bouncing what we call tending it. You could also do that as a progression. And so typically what I'll do is like volume first, then I'll hit max strength really hard in the next mesocycle, and then I'll speed it up. Sometimes I'll do pauses, but if they're doing isometrics, I don't really see a need to to add that in because we're already addressing that in the warm up kind of.
isaiah:Actually, on that point, Travis asked me this question. Why do something like a three second pause squad at 70% of your max? Is that I can tell you what I answered him. I told him during your, during the stress training cycle, there's an isometric condition. You want to train asymetrics, but then my, that isn't super intense.
isaiah:No. So what I answered was it's preparing you to do more intense isometrics later on. Yeah.
john:Yeah. It's it's does like three things. Right? One is you're gonna get so let's say I held a calf raise, you know, for three seconds at 75% load, four by five or something like that. Right?
john:First, you're gonna get 15, if it's four by five, you're gonna get however fast you lowered it, the three second hold, and then the up phase. Each rep might take five, yeah, exactly, you're gonna get five seconds per rep. So time to retention there is like twenty five seconds for one set if you're doing five reps or something like that at load. And then you're training the specific angle for jumping. So if you're going to do it like at neutral, that's going to be relatively specific for one foot and two foot jumping and springing at that point.
john:Right? And it's also going to function to train into what you're going to focus on next. Because isometrically, we're not as strong as we are at really, really high eccentric loads, like really, really fast, when you lengthen it really quickly. And we're also pretty weak, and we're really weak when we do it fast concentrically, so it kind of functions somewhere in the middle in terms of that fiber's ability to generate force. And so we're going to slide up that curve in terms of the fascicle's ability, the muscle's ability to generate force.
john:So we're going to get into higher load stuff. You know, you would do that before you would do so you go max strength or actually, what I would probably do is a sub maximal isometric, then I would get into, like, maybe I would do that as the volume early on. Right? So 70% hold, then you would get into the max strength concentric, so, you know, you're functioning isometrically down here, but then you're gonna move up to the max strength concentric, and then we're gonna move up to the really high force eccentric stuff, where it's like you're moving slowly, but you're eccentric and you're at an overload. You're doing more weight than you could do isometrically, so again, your intensity is increasing.
john:It's more specific because the forces are higher, and we're getting better adaptations for what's to come. Then that's when you do fast down, fast up type stuff.
isaiah:It's like it's like getting intimate with a lady.
john:Yeah. Got no levels.
isaiah:You don't go zero to a 100.
john:You don't go zero to a thousand, right? You've got a is like
isaiah:training foreplay.
john:Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's a great analogy. Training foreplay. So, yeah, there's a progression.
john:And once you get into that really fast stuff, that's typically where you would almost be better off doing some of the stuff with the bands, where you're going really, really fast down and then pushing up, like what Rolf does with the ten eighty Quantum. You would do it at Or that you would do maybe banded fast reps, double leg or single leg, it doesn't really matter. And then you get into plyos, and that's really where you're taking everything that you developed underneath the hood and start to put it into effect on the road. Right? That's that's where it's like, okay, we've to put the power down now.
john:We've got to learn how to take the new stiffness qualities, the new motor recruitment, the new rate of force development abilities that we have, and apply that to the floor so that we can jump higher. And that's what, you you're getting these underlying transformations, transmutating them, underlying transformations, transmutating them, and you're going from something that was really general, seemingly general, but had specific implications, to something that's highly specific and going to have a huge transfer of training later on. So it lets you do the things that have really high transfers of training better, and that's ultimately why we periodize, that's why things are set up the way they are. I do this with most of my strength exercises. It was kind of assumed like you didn't even want to do lower leg work with sprinters.
john:Like early on, we didn't do any lower
isaiah:leg No, didn't start till
john:I changed that over the years because of Achilles' issues.
isaiah:'22, I think. Yeah.
john:The first implement quite a bit.
isaiah:Year and a half, probably.
john:Now I'd say it's like one of the biggest staples. Like, I don't like when guys skimp on on those at all, cedar or sanding, because I I like the tendon adaptations mostly. And even if I only had the tendon adaptations and the changes to the, like, muscle tissue, I would then be able to actualize it or transmutate it on the court, right, if you're jumping once a week. So that's the progression. That's essentially how I like to treat it.
john:You could do this over the course of one month, or, know, you could split it up across. Well, I would never do it in one month. Would Depends where you have. Yeah. Depends where you're at.
john:But I would do, like, you know, a month of the lower force stuff and just climb up in the forces and the velocities. That's kind of Yeah. And specificity.
isaiah:It, like, oscillates every three months, probably.
john:For you. Yeah. Yeah. I think with track guys, I'll stretch it out a little bit, but the you guys like to jump high more for you.
isaiah:Like, goes like general to specific over three months, and then it's like Highly specific. And then yeah. And then it gets general to super specific in the second batch. Yeah. And then we go super general to because I'm usually banged up
john:Yeah.
isaiah:To moderately
john:This would be like across a year is what he's explaining. So like, you know, those first three months
isaiah:It's like it's like this. It's like, if this is general and then specific, it's like boom.
john:Down, back up.
isaiah:Yep. And then and then it starts back down here and Exactly. We kinda do that. And that's And ideally over it goes like this.
john:Yeah. Over time. Yeah. And that's and, yeah, like, to year, you'd wanna see that curve get even more intense and specific over time, and that's how you make long term gains. So that's a general lesson on progressive overload specificity and why we do what we do when it comes to the lower leg, the Achilles, the calf.
john:Remember, this is what's propelling you upwards, not your tibialis anterior. I don't know why these myths have been propagated so well, but that is not a triple exception.
isaiah:Because they prey on the weak. The weak
john:minded, those who aren't willing to research.
isaiah:Actually, no. It's preying on the ignorant. That's what it is. Yeah.
john:True. That's
isaiah:You can if you make it seem like the logic makes sense
john:If you say it convincingly enough.
isaiah:Yeah. Yeah. I could do a lot. We were doing a convince me and Nick were doing a like a
john:Oh, yeah. They were
isaiah:trying. They
john:were trying to convince me that They're like, yeah. If you break the rule all the time, then you can increase your capacity and adapt. And I was like, yeah. No. I'm I'm just gonna shut down this whole conversation here.
isaiah:That's why we're in a place of great responsibility because we could give you guys we
john:could make it up, but we
isaiah:know You gotta weigh your hamstring and we can drag. You know
john:what I'm Did you say weigh your hamstring?
isaiah:To weigh your hamstring. It's what we can track in a sprint. And then you look at the penultimate step, it's the same thing. So you wanna do an aggressive single leg RDL to train the penultimate step. Most of the energy comes from penultimate step.
isaiah:Don't train the jump. Everything is a result of what came previously. Yeah. So, train the penultimate If step
john:your knees bend quickly in a jump, then you need to fast hamstring curl. Fast. Because it's fast on the down phase and it's fast in the hamstring curl.
isaiah:That's what we're
john:going to Those are different muscle contractions, Isaiah. Meat doesn't work out. It's gonna
isaiah:be the hamstring. That's all we're gonna be doing. No squatting, no jumping. It's the penultimate. I'm talking
john:about Nordics tomorrow. Just I Translating human penultimate. THP. Alright. That's the podcast, guys.
john:See you next time.
