THE OG: Calves

Bringing our series on bodyparts to an end, it's the part everyone tries to avoid training if they can

Welcome to this belated final instalment on specific bodyparts. I tend to put off calf-training and so, true to form, I’ve put off publishing this guide to calf-training.

But now that it’s here, we can get on, in future instalments, to talking specifically about Vince’s ideas on nutrition, including his famous diets like the 36-eggs-a-day diet.

As always, all quotations are taken from Vince’s 1984 book The Wild Physique, unless otherwise stated.

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I’ve never really trained my calves, not directly, and since I’ve never been overweight and I don’t have gammon-calf genetics, they’re not a stand-out bodypart for me. I do a lot of walking and running and I ruck up a steep hill near my house with a 20kg backpack and a 20kg kettlebell in one hand, so my calves get a regular pounding, but I’ve never had the inclination to do endless sets of bodyweight or weighted calf raises.

You’re probably the same, I’d guess. It takes sheer force of will to get even professional bodybuilders to train their calves. It’s just boring. Not fun. That’s it.

Arnold, famously, had to humiliate himself to make training calves a priority. He knew his skinny, long calves were perhaps his biggest weakness, so he insisted on wearing cut-off shorts that displayed his calves to the whole world. Previously, he had done his best to hide his calves. Many of his early photoshoots feature him standing knee-deep in water, or use other devices to make sure his calves are hidden or seen from a more favourable angle.

At the very beginning of his section on calf training in The Wild Physique, Vince notes that some people just have big calves naturally. You probably know this from observation already, but it bears repeating.

My vote for the best-looking calves goes to Chris Dickerson. Somebody once told me that Dickerson's brother, who has never done any bodybuilding in his life, has lower-leg development even bigger than Chris's. So much for genetics! (WP, p.127)

Vince then notes that what makes the calves look really good—or bad—is the size of the surrounding joints. That means the knee and ankle. Remember: Vince understood, and wanted you to understand, that bodyparts have to be considered in combination, not isolation. You could have the biggest calves in the world, but if you had fat knee and ankle joints as well, they wouldn’t look anywhere near as good as if you had slender, graceful, almost feminine joints.