Steps
- Grab an exercise band and stand on it with your toes making sure that the length of the band between the foot and the arms is the same for both sides.
- While holding the handles of the band, raise the arms to the side of your head as if you were getting ready to perform a shoulder press. The palms should be facing forward with the elbows bent and to the sides. This movement will create tension on the band. This will be your starting position.
- Keeping the hands by your shoulder, stand up on your toes as you exhale and contract the calves hard at the top of the movement.
- After a one second contraction, slowly go back down to the starting position.
- Repeat for the recommended amount of repetitions.
Tracking it in OneRep
Add the calf raises - with bands to a routine and your previous weight and reps sit beside every set, so the decision to add load is made by what is already on the screen rather than by memory. Exercise history and volume trends are one tap away, and logging works offline for the gyms where signal does not reach.
Because OneRep tracks food on the same timeline, a stall on this lift can be read against what you were actually eating that month — which is the difference between a programming problem and an eating one. More on that in tracking progressive overload without a spreadsheet.
Where the instructions come from
The steps above come from free-exercise-db, a public-domain exercise dataset. They are general guidance, not coaching for your body: if a movement hurts, stop and get someone qualified to look at it.