Eddie Hall Shares His Leg Day Routine and Tips for Building Massive Calves

Eddie Hall, former World’s Strongest Man and purveyor of odd YouTube workout videos, just shared a post outlining his leg day routine (consisting of three hours in the gym) and his top tips for building your calf muscles.

Starting with squats, Hall begins with 180 kgs (397 pounds), and keeps adding plates to the barbell, bringing it up to 260 kgs (573 pounds). “It’s always a tough one, squats,” he says. “Do you make that decision to go one step further, and possibly break your back? Or, shall we just leave it there as a tough five reps?” He decides to take it further, adding on another plate, bringing the total weight up to 300 kg (661 pounds).

Moving onto the leg press, he takes the same approach, gradually increasing the weight. “It’s always good to work up to a tough five or six reps,” he says, explaining that this helps with progression week after week.

There’s also another very important factor that Hall considers when planning his training sessions. “It’s a tough decision at this point,” he says, while contemplating whether to max out on the leg press, “whether I go for a poo now, or I shit myself a little bit on the last set.”

This isn’t just off-color strongman humor; Hall is serious. “Usually, training legs, it makes you feel like you need a poo, but you actually don’t need a poo,” he explains. “Like, I feel like I need a poo, but I’ll go for a poo, and all I’ll poo is like the tiniest little Malteser, and you always have to wipe your arse like 200 times, and it just ruins the session. So, sod it, I’ll hold it in and just hope for the best.”

Pretty brave, considering that during another leg press session, we’ve seen Hall losing consciousness and control of his bowels. Midway through really pushing himself in this latest session, it happens again: Hall pauses his set and regretfully announces: “I’ve shit myself.”

After a quick clean-up, he switches to hamstring standing curls, which burns his glutes and hamstrings even more after the leg press workout, and then onto four sets of controlled leg extensions.

He finishes the workout by offering some guidance on calf training.

“I suppose the best advice I can give to anyone out there wanting big calves is to do squats, do leg press,” he says. “And try to do it without any support kit… You don’t want to be squatting in these assisted machines where you just put weights on and change the pin; they’re no good because you’re not training the core muscles in your legs. Free stand squats are probably the best thing you can do to train your calves, leg press as well. What you find with a leg press is that when you get it in the right position, you actually push on your toes quite heavily without realizing it. And again, that’s doing your calves really well.”

That’s what works for Hall—but that’s not all you can do to target those difficult muscles. You can use isolation exercises like calf raises (as Hall does in the video) to hammer them too.

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