BodyFitness, Training


	The Calves Bodybuilding Diamonds

By Xavier Fox

There is nothing worse than being at a bodybuilding contest when a contestant appears on stage with thick and sweeping quads and full hamstrings, but then once you get below the knee it looks like they are balancing on a pair of pencils. A lot of bodybuilders seem to neglect the fact that their calves must be in proportion with the rest of their leg development. If the calves are lacking, then the bodybuilder will start losing points quickly when it comes to hitting the mandatory poses. The calves will be visible during every pose, and the judges have trained eyes, so flaws will stick out right away. If you want to be a complete bodybuilder, then your leg training cannot just consist of quads and hamstrings… you need to have big calves if you are going to play with the bog boys.

When it comes to calves one of my favourite all-time bodybuilders is Vince Taylor. His calves were not only large but they had tremendous shape and looked almost exactly like diamonds. They spread out from behind his knee when performing the front and rear poses, and when he turned to the side his calves would still stick out and look like someone was hanging Christmas hams on the back of his legs. Look up some old pictures of Vince Taylor, and you will see what a perfectly developed calf muscle should look like.
One of the main mistakes people make when training calves is that they either only do one exercise for them, or they only do one type of exercise, meaning that they do either a standing or a seated exercise but not both. Based on the anatomy of the calf muscle that is a mistake, because the calves are made up of a few different muscle heads and in order to train all of them correctly, you will sometimes need to be seated and sometimes need to be standing.
Big mistake number two that is common when training calves is using light weights with high numbers of repetitions. A lot of people have it stuck in the head that since calf muscles consist of mainly slow twitch muscle fibres they must train them with lots of volume. This is incorrect. Like other muscles, if you want the calves to be big, then you need to train them with big weights. Enough weight must be used so that you can only do 6-10 reps at most, and keeping rest minimal between sets will help maintain high intensity levels.
Mistake number three, and arguably the worst mistake people make when training calves, is that they bounce at the bottom of each rep and use momentum to keep the weight going. The calves must be trained strictly in order to grow. The motion must be stopped at the completion of the rep for a split second and the calves should be squeezed quickly. The weight should always be kept under control and not permitted to simply bounce up and down like a your legs are attached to a pogo stick. Proper form forces the muscle to do all the work, which leads to maximum amounts of muscle growth.


	One-Of-A-Kind Legs, Zinjun Croon-Style



	*By Dan Smith & Maria Escamilla* Believe it or not, when Zinjun Croon was at school he sought to stand out in sports, as do all American teenagers, so that he could go to university. He learned to wrestle and played American football, but he found his natural talent lay in tenpin bowling, and ended up becoming the university champion. Then he came into contact with the weights. Ever since, he has set out to become a professional bodybuilder. But to go down this road he must have a set of legs like no other, the very challenge he has set himself now. When in his teenage years he attended a state school the star of our article was given the go ahead to do any kind of sport he wished; not that there was much else to choose from. And he did just that. Surprisingly, though, he didn’t become the American football team’s star player, but the tenpin bowling champion. It might not be a typical sport for a young lad of Zinjun’s powerful build, but he found that he was really good at it and quickly saw his chance to stand out in a sport in which, back then, the level of competition wasn’t particularly high. Then he discovered weight training and bodybuilding, and these became his priority straight away. He devoted himself heart and soul to his training, the reason for his extraordinary physique. Of course, the bulk doesn’t come from bowling, but from the weight training. His body responded immediately to the weight training and his one and only aim became to go professional. Zinjun was born in Redwood, a small town near San Francisco, California, US, on 8 February 1985 and is an only child. Today he lives in Las Vegas, which, after Los Angeles, is the city home to most bodybuilders. From tenpin bowler to bodybuilder As a teenager, Croon practised loads of different sports. The ones he enjoyed the most were football and wrestling. But perhaps you should hear all this from instead ... “I practised a lot of different sports because I went to a state school and there wasn’t much else there to do. I enjoyed American football and wrestling the most because I was fascinated by the notion of strength both entail.” He confesses to being fairly good at American football, but one day he tried his hand at tenpin bowling ... and turned out to be so good at it that he became the champion in no time. However, at just 13 years old he had already picked up his first weight, as part of the training he would do with the other members of the football team. But it wasn’t until he was 19, in fact, that he decided to devote his life to bodybuilding.