Jun 17
ATG Weekly Newsletter 18 June 2022 & How to Make Your Achilles More Bulletproof
I often reference my equipment list, but one of our original ATG members has a YouTube channel with solutions to build some of the tools yourself. This could be a great option for people who enjoy building stuff. Click here to see an example.
Speaking of the ATG community, it was awesome to see our first ATG-certified coaches receiving their framed certs this week! You can click here to see if there’s a coach near you.
As for new content this week, I added a mini educational video to my weekly filming schedule. It’s about 2 minutes long, shot vertically, with text on-screen: “Fun Fact: Usain Bolt Lifted Weights With His Feet.”
And per your popular request, this week’s full breakdown is “How to Make Your Achilles More Bulletproof.”
On that note, I think I’ll include a brief article for those who would prefer to read about each week’s topic. Without further ado…
HOW TO CREATE A MORE BULLETPROOF ACHILLES
The key point on the Achilles is that you have a lower, deeper calf muscle called the soleus, which has the strongest pull — pound-for-pound — of any muscle in the human body! This isn’t surprising though, because the Achilles is your largest and strongest tendon. In the photo below, you can see your upper calf muscles (“gastrocnemius” — which essentially means “belly of the leg”), and your soleus, which lies lower and deeper there by your Achilles:
Fortunately, it’s extremely simple to train your soleus muscles. When you do calf raises with a bent knee, you effectively target them!
This starts incredibly gently with a free weight seated calf raise (the left side of the picture below) using any kind of slanted surface, and it progresses to a machine seated calf raise. When you do this without a machine, you’re lifting only your own legs, plus whatever weight you add individually to each side. But when you do this with a machine, you’re lifting the machinery itself, as well as some of your own body weight since you lift the seat itself to some degree. What this means is that the free weight version is unilateral: Each side is working independently of the other — but (if you used two legs) the machine is not unilateral. Therefore, when I use a machine, I train one side at a time in order to build balanced strength between sides. Our solei are often imbalanced due to years of jumping or landing through one side more than the other, along with accumulated ankle or achilles injuries which can leave us weaker even years later.
Here’s what’s even cooler: You don’t need ANY equipment to start! The KOT Calf Raise from the Zero program scales tremendously, from two legs, to one leg, to one leg with load:
So what’s better?
Well, over the past 4 years I’ve used an even amount of each. They both work, and they both scale so you can help others at a variety of levels.
I live half my year using a home gym so that I’m fully in touch with what that’s like. I can’t ask home gym owners to buy seated calf machines, but the KOT Calf Raise gets the job done, no matter how advanced a program you’re on.
The soleus may not be big or sexy, but it’s likely one of the missing links that prevents us from knowing how athletic and bulletproof we could truly be! Just take a look at the natural lower leg of a young Michael Jordan, before he lifted weights:
That’s all for this week.
Yours in Solutions,
Ben
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