one legged calf raise
Posted on May 8th, 2011 by jonathan31
i tore my tendon 1 year and 3 days ago…
i was wondering, I still can’t do a one legged calf raise for the life of me. I sort of abandoned my exercises 3 months ago when my gym membership expired. Perhaps that’s to explain. The inner portion of my calf muscle is still severely atrophied as my good calf is very muscular… comparing the two is just depressing. There’s no muscle to calf raise… running is still pretty much a no go. I have basically no support system so I’m turning to this blog. Any thoughts?
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I may not be the best source of advice, J, because I’m in a similar “boat”. More like 17 months for me, though I was busy and distracted for several months with open-heart surgery(!). Now I’m power-walking 2.5 miles at a time and bicycling 6 miles on many days, partly for transportation and partly for Cardiac Rehab. I’m returning to normal quite well for those activities, but definitely NOT for the 1-leg calf raise.
I hope to be “cleared” for running soon after a new stress-cardiogram, and I’m very curious to see what that will feel like, and whether it will make my calf strength improve. I still do a bunch of 2-leggers while brushing my teeth, and I sometimes rise up silly-high at the end of my strides while power-walking, but mostly I’ve been thinking about the ticker more than the calf, though that’s starting to change. I’m not completely resigned to my calf having strengthened as much as I ever will, though that may be the case. Visually, I’m not too lopsided, but the 1-leg heel raises are still from different planets.
Hi, I’m at 9 weeks and aiming towards the one leg calf raise too. I presume that your tendon has healed 100% in which case I assume it must just been muscle strength that’s stopping you performing a OLCR.
I’ve been pondering on that aim and looked at this as a weight training goal. I used to train in the gym a lot to build up strength etc. I can see a potential problem with trying to go from 2 legged calf raises to a OLCR by just using our body weight alone as a training weight. If I were at the gym and could safely do say 20kg weight of resistance on a muscle and then tried to double it to 40kg people would think I’m mad.
A plan would have to be devised of say 5% increase every week with a lot of training and reps in between and after 10 weeks or so we may have lift off. Well its must be impossible to do this incremental approach with your body weight alone as, like the gym, if you are 1kg over the max pulling strength of your muscle the weight is going nowhere, just like our heels.
So have you thought about or tried a serious training program to meet our goal of a OLCR. I plan to start one at the gym at 10 weeks. I believe we can all do a OLCR again but it will take a bit of dedicated focus on the ATR leg alone to get there.
Just my opinion and I wish us all the best ☺
i had pool access while on vacation, it was a great way to get the OCLR given buoyancy. if i didn’t live in manhattan, i would definitely find access to the pool (YMCA?) and train like an animal to get back to normalcy.
JJ, I think we can actually come pretty close to your incremental weight-training approach without gym machinery, by doing 2-leg CRs and shifting weight progressively toward the weak side. It’s pretty obvious when we’ve shifted too much, because we won’t achieve lift-off. But loading it up almost that much, and doing a few handfuls of “reps”, and several such “sets” per day, sounds very much like a solid weight-training regime that should produce results. Doug53 and others have also suggested using the standard weight-training way of judging intensity: If you’re NOT stiff the next day, add more; If you ARE stiff 2 days later, do less.
Mind you, I haven’t been that conscientious myself this time around. But I’ve also got my FIRST time around (8 years earlier) in the back of my mind. That time, I was capable of pushing off normally at the end of a barefoot stride at around 17 weeks, as soon as I (finally!) came out of my hinged boot (after 3 or 4 casts). No exercise regimes AT ALL, just walking and bicycling in the boot. I was even capable of doing a few full-height OLCRs (admittedly while groaning from the effort) on that same day — though I should NOT have done any, because I set my rehab back a month (painfully, too!) by doing so.
But after that month and another few months of just walking and cycling, I could do a bunch of full-height OLCRs without groaning. That time the OLCR returned “all by itself”, and this time it hasn’t, though I’m quite close. (I do weigh ~10 lbs more than I did then, and I’m almost THAT close, but not quite.)
So something is causing a difference between the two recoveries. Maybe something random, and we’ll never know. Maybe my increasing age and fogey-ness are making a difference. Maybe the stitches made a difference (1st time was op, 2nd was non-op). Maybe the long, boring, ultra-conservative, old-fashioned first rehab paradoxically helped more than the new-fangled UWO rehab the second time, despite all evidence and the logic about muscle atrophy to the contrary. Or maybe some little thing happened this time (a calf-muscle spasm?) that caused the connection between my Gastroc and my AT to heal a bit too long, and the last bit of calf strength will always elude me. (Trust me to continue to share new developments with you folks, if I can!)
Norm totally agree on your comments it was just that with weights you could confirm the improvement in strength along the way to a OLCR. Saying that I may have been a little hopeful starting my program next week. I seem to get a red sensitive patch in the middle of my scar after ive been using the leg. It’s right above the build up of scar tissue. Its exactly where i used to think the walking boot was rubbing but its obviously something else. Any ideas ?