Muscles worked
The single leg calf raise puts your whole bodyweight on one calf, which roughly doubles the load compared with both feet. The gastrocnemius and soleus do the work as in other straight-knee calf raises, but now the muscles around your ankle also have to keep your foot steady on a small area. The exercise also makes a simple test: can you manage roughly the same number of full reps on your left and right leg?
Common mistakes
- Your free leg helps out. It is easy to hook that foot behind your working leg or touch the floor with your toes. Bend the free knee and keep that foot in the air.
- Your hip drifts out to the side. On one leg, the pelvis tends to slide out over the working foot. Stand tall, keep your hips level and squeeze your glutes lightly.
- You move to one leg too soon. Without a base of calf strength, the reps are short and jerky from the start. First build up to about 20 slow reps on both feet.
Variations and alternatives
- Bodyweight calf raises on both feet work as a warm-up before your single-leg sets and as the level below.
- The calf raise on a step gives your heel room to drop below the edge. Do it on one leg when the floor feels too short.
- The single leg dumbbell calf raise takes over when bodyweight falls short.
Sets and reps
Do 10 to 20 reps per leg over two or three sets, one leg straight after the other, and rest a minute before the next round. The basics of choosing sets and reps have a guide of their own.
Once you manage 20 full reps on both legs, it is time to make it harder: stand on a step, hold a dumbbell or a lightly loaded rucksack, or slow the tempo. Change one thing at a time and you get progressive overload at a pace your body can keep up with. If your Achilles tendon hurts, rather than your calf just feeling tired, stop the exercise and have it looked at by a physiotherapist or doctor.