Tibialis Raise

What the tibialis raise actually trains

A tibialis raise is a dorsiflexion exercise in which you fix your heels and pull your toes up towards your shins against resistance, which is the exact opposite of a calf raise.

The muscle doing the work is the tibialis anterior, the long strip of muscle running down the front and outside of your shin. It lifts the foot, and it also decelerates the foot as it lands when you walk or run. The extensor muscles of the toes help a little, and nothing else is involved.

This is one of the very few muscles in the leg that gets essentially no work from anything else you do in the gym. Squats, hinges, lunges and calf raises all load the back of the lower leg. None of them load the front. If you want the tibialis anterior trained, you have to train it on purpose.

That is the entire case for the exercise, and it is a reasonable one.

The case that is usually made for it online is much larger and much less well supported. You will be told it prevents shin splints, bulletproofs your knees, improves your squat depth and fixes your running. Those claims have run far ahead of what anyone has actually demonstrated.

So treat it as what it is. A small, cheap accessory that trains a muscle nothing else trains, takes three minutes, and costs you nothing in recovery. That is a perfectly good reason to include it. It is not a reason to build your programme around it.

One more thing worth knowing: the tibialis anterior fatigues quickly and then burns unpleasantly. That is normal and it is not damage.

Setting up and executing

The simplest version needs a wall. Stand with your back against it and walk your feet out about thirty centimetres, then lean your hips and shoulders back into the wall so your heels are lightly loaded and your weight is behind your ankles.

Keep the knees straight but not locked hard.

Pull the toes up towards the shins as far as they will go, and pause for a beat at the top with the shins tight.

Lower the toes slowly over two to three seconds, stopping just before the feet slap the floor, and lift again.

For a longer range, stand with your heels on a step and let the toes hang free below the edge. For a loaded version, hook the toes under a machine pad or a weighted tib bar and do the same thing.

The mistakes that cost you the most

Bending the knees is the fault that quietly removes the exercise. If the knee dips and straightens with each rep, the leg is generating the movement and the ankle is just going along with it. Keep the knees still and let only the ankles move.

Dropping the toes is the more expensive mistake because it throws away half of every rep. Roig and colleagues found eccentric training produced greater strength and mass gains than concentric training, and here the lowering is the phase where the tibialis anterior works against gravity in the way it does when you walk. Letting the foot fall is skipping the useful part.

Standing too close to the wall is a setup problem rather than a technique one. If your feet are nearly underneath you, your weight sits over your ankles and there is almost no resistance. Walk out until it feels genuinely hard.

Rushing the reps hides fatigue behind momentum, which matters more here than usual because the muscle is small and tires fast.

And expecting too much of it is the mistake that leads people to give up on it. It is an accessory. Judge it as one.

Sets, reps and rest by goal

High reps and short rests, because this is a small muscle with a short range.

For muscle gain, three sets of fifteen to twenty five with a minute of rest. For strength, three sets of twelve to twenty with a minute, though tibialis strength is not a goal anyone should be chasing for its own sake. In a fat loss phase, two sets of twenty to thirty with forty five seconds.

Take the lowering slowly. Two to three seconds down is the difference between training the muscle and just flicking your feet.

Progression is the awkward part. With the wall version, the only variables are how far out your feet are, how many reps you do and whether you use one leg or two. Once twenty five controlled reps are comfortable, move to one leg or find a loaded option, because otherwise you will spend months adding reps to something that stopped being hard.

Schoenfeld and colleagues found a dose response between weekly hard sets and hypertrophy, so if you want this muscle to change, two or three short sessions a week will do more than one.

Refalo and colleagues found stopping a rep or two short of failure produces comparable growth to going all the way, which is a relief here, because the burning sensation near failure is genuinely unpleasant and unnecessary.

Where it fits in your split

At the very end of a lower body session, next to your calf work.

On push, pull and legs it goes at the end of legs day. On an upper and lower split it slots into either lower session. On a bro split it belongs on leg day, though there is no real reason it could not be added to an upper day since it costs nothing to recover from. On a full body programme it is optional, and it is the first thing to drop when you are short of time. On a bodyweight programme the wall version works anywhere.

Pairing it with calf raises is the sensible pattern. One set of calves, one set of shins, alternating. The two muscles are antagonists, so neither interferes with the other and the whole block takes about five minutes.

If you are new to training and choosing what to cut, cut this before you cut anything else. It is a nice extra rather than a load bearing part of a programme.

Variations worth knowing

The wall tibialis raise is the default. No equipment, works anywhere, and the resistance is adjusted by how far you walk your feet out.

The step version puts your heels on a raised edge with the toes hanging free, which gives a longer range at the bottom than the floor allows.

The tib bar is a short weighted bar that hooks over the toes while you sit, and it is the only version that lets you progress in small increments indefinitely.

A dedicated dorsiflexion machine does the same job with a pad, and is worth using if your gym happens to have one.

Banded dorsiflexion, seated with a band looped around the forefoot, is the travel friendly option and is easy to scale.

And the single leg version is the free way to double the load, which is usually the right next step from the wall version.

What the evidence says

There is no dedicated research on this exercise in our reference pool, and rather than pretend otherwise, the sensible thing is to apply what is known about training small muscles generally.

Kassiano and colleagues found greater gastrocnemius hypertrophy when training at long muscle lengths, which for the lower leg supports using a step or a machine that allows the ankle to travel through its full range rather than a shortened one.

Kovács and colleagues examined how knee position affects plantarflexor activation during dynamic ankle work, which is a reminder that ankle exercises are sensitive to joint position and that keeping the knee still is not a fussy detail.

Pallarés and colleagues found full range training produced better strength and hypertrophy outcomes than partial range work, supporting the full pull to the top and the full lower.

Pedrosa and colleagues found training at long muscle lengths produced favourable adaptations, which supports getting the toes below the level of the heels where you can.

Roig and colleagues found eccentric training produced greater strength and mass gains than concentric training, supporting the slow lowering.

Schoenfeld and colleagues on weekly volume and Refalo and colleagues on proximity to failure supply the programming, and both point towards several short sessions rather than one heroic one.

Common questions

Will this prevent shin splints?

Nobody has shown that it does. The idea is plausible, since the tibialis anterior is involved in absorbing landing forces, but plausible is not the same as demonstrated. Train it because nothing else trains it, not because you have been promised protection.

Why does it burn so much?

Because the tibialis anterior is small, works through a short range and fatigues quickly. The burning is metabolic and it fades within a minute. It is uncomfortable rather than meaningful, and you do not need to chase it.

Do I need a tib bar?

Only if you want to keep progressing. The wall version stops being hard fairly quickly and then you are just accumulating reps. A tib bar, a machine or a band lets you add resistance, which is what actually keeps a muscle adapting.

Should I do this before or after calf raises?

After, or alternated with them. They are opposing muscles, so neither one tires the other, and pairing them turns two short exercises into one efficient block at the end of a leg session.

Is it worth doing at all?

Yes, if you have three spare minutes. It is the only direct work the front of your shin will ever get, it costs nothing in recovery and it will not interfere with anything else. Just keep your expectations proportionate to a three minute accessory.