Tibialis raises: the muscle on the front of your shin, against a wall, seated or with a weight

A tibialis raise lifts the front of your foot toward your shin while your heel stays down. The main muscle doing it is the tibialis anterior, the one that runs down the front of your shin, beside the bone. Lifting the foot this way is called dorsiflexion, and it's the opposite of what a calf raise does: the calves point the foot, the tibialis anterior pulls it back up.

You use it every step you take. It lifts your toes so they clear the ground as your leg swings through, and it lowers the front of your foot under control after your heel lands. This page covers how strong the muscle is, what the training studies found, how to do the raise, the versions, how it differs from a calf raise, the faults and the sets. The calf side is on the calf workout.

How strong the front of the shin is

Much weaker than the calves. In 100 healthy, active adults, 69 men and 31 women with an average age of 38.5, tested on a machine that measures turning force at the ankle, the muscles that lift the foot produced on average 36.1% of the force of the muscles that point it.¹ The women's average was 37.4 newton-metres for lifting the foot and 100.4 for pointing it; the men's 53.6 and 158.1.

That's why the loads here are small. Bodyweight against a wall is a real set for most people, and a weighted version uses a fraction of what you'd hold for a calf raise.

How to do a tibialis raise against a wall

1. Stand with your back and hips against a wall, feet hip-width apart, heels about a foot in front of it.
2. Keep your legs straight and your weight on your heels.
3. Lift your toes as high as you can toward your shins, keeping your heels on the floor.
4. Pause for a second at the top.
5. Lower your toes slowly until they almost touch the floor, then lift again without resting them. That's one rep.

Move your heels further from the wall to make it harder, and closer to make it easier.

Does training make it stronger?

In one trial, yes. In a trial of 30 healthy adults, about 27 years old on average, split into a training group and a control group, the training group did maximal efforts lifting the foot of one leg on an isokinetic machine, four days a week for four weeks. Its measures of turning force rose 14% to 28% in the trained leg, depending on the measure and the speed tested, and the untrained leg of the same people got stronger too, which the authors call a cross-training effect.²

That was a laboratory machine, not tibialis raises. No trial found for this page has trained tibialis raises and measured the muscle's strength or size, so read it as evidence that the muscle responds to hard training, not as a result for the raise itself.

The versions, from easiest to hardest

Heel walking raises the muscle's activity above ordinary walking, at least in one study: in 22 college students, activity in the tibialis anterior was higher in every one of a set of foot drills, heel walking among them, than in normal walking, by 4.0% to 68.3% depending on the drill.³

Tibialis raises vs calf raises

They train opposite movements. A calf raise points your foot and works the calves on the back of your lower leg; a tibialis raise lifts it and works the front. So one doesn't replace the other, and they pair well: a set of calf raises, then a set of tibialis raises, with no rest between, so one side rests while the other works. Expect to use far less weight on the tibialis raise, for the reason in the first section.

The common faults, and a fix for each

• Bending your knees. Keep your legs straight against the wall; bent knees let you rock instead of lift.
• Lifting your heels. Your heels stay down the whole set; the movement is all at the ankle.
• Short reps. Lift your toes as high as they'll go and lower until they nearly touch the floor.
• Slapping the toes down. Lower in about two seconds; controlling the way down is part of the muscle's job.
• Too much weight too soon. If the weight slides or your toes can't reach full height, go lighter.
• Pushing through something that hurts. Sore muscles the next day are normal; a sharp or lasting hurt in your shin, ankle or foot isn't. Stop, and see a doctor or a physical therapist.

Sets, reps and where it goes

• Two or three sets of 15 to 25 at the end of a leg day, stopping one or two reps short. (How to judge reps left.) The American College of Sports Medicine's 2026 position stand, which covers healthy adults, advises at least two sets per exercise.⁴
• Pair it with your calf raises, alternating sets, so the extra time is small.
• Twice a week is plenty to start. The trial above used four days a week on a machine; there's no need to match it with a bodyweight exercise.
• Make it harder in small steps. When 25 reps come easy against the wall, move your heels further out or add a light weight. (Progressive overload covers the options.)

If you'd rather not plan it alone

Tibialis raises are one small exercise; deciding where the extras fit in a week that already has squats, calves and a few days you can't train is the part a page can't do. Coaching is the version where your workouts are built around the days you actually have, and a weekly call looks at the week you just had and rebuilds the next one. Coaching to build muscle explains how that works, and here's how to apply. Otherwise: at your next leg session, try two sets of 20 against a wall after your calf raises, and write down how far your heels were from the wall.