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Exercise

Tibialis machine raise

Your heels stay put, a pad sits across the tops of your feet, and you pull your toes up toward your shins. It trains the muscle down the front of your shin, the same one the wall tibialis raise trains. The difference is weight: here you can keep adding it, so the set stays hard as you get stronger.

Reckoner

4 November 20261 min read

Pad over your feet, pull your toes up.

The cue Reckoner carries for this movement.
Pattern
Dorsiflexion
Trains
Tibialis anterior
Kit
Machine tibialis
Loading
A weight you choose
Reckoner prescribes
Nothing yet. Reckoner only prescribes what the science backs, and for the shin the science is not there yet. It is in the library so you can read it and train it on your own terms.
Skill
Simple to learn
Recovery cost
Very low
Not prescribed if you have declared
Ankle

Muscles worked

Primary
Tibialis anterior

How to do it

  1. Heels anchored, pad across your feet

    On a tibialis machine, put your heels on the platform and slide your feet under the pad so it rests across the tops of them, a little behind the toes. With a tib bar, sit on a bench high enough that your feet hang free and hook the bar over the tops of both feet.

  2. Pull your toes up

    That is Reckoner's cue for this movement. Drag the front of both feet up toward your shins as far as they will travel. Your heels stay still and only your feet move.

  3. Hold the top for a beat

    The last inch is where the muscle works hardest and where the rep is easiest to cut short. A pause at the top is how you find out whether you got there.

  4. Lower slowly until your toes point down

    Let the weight take your toes down under control through the whole range, and stop it before it drops. Taking longer on the way down than on the way up is half of what makes the set work.

What goes wrong

  • Bouncing out of the bottom

    Letting the toes drop and rebound uses momentum to get through the hardest part of the rep. It reads as more reps for the same weight. Start every rep from still at the bottom.

  • Letting the heels come up

    Once the heels leave the platform or the bench, the pad rocks forward and the whole leg starts doing the lifting. The set feels easier for the wrong reason. Heels down, feet only.

  • Training through new shin pain

    Some soreness down the front of the shin the day after is ordinary when the muscle is new to the work, and it settles. Pain that builds while you train and eases when you stop is a different thing. The muscle sits in a closed compartment, so stop the lift and get it looked at rather than adding a plate4.

Questions people ask

Is this better than the wall tibialis raise?

It is the same movement with the one thing a wall cannot give you, which is weight you can keep adding. Nobody has run a trial of a tibialis machine or a tib bar, so no study says it builds more than the wall does. What it gives you is a set that stays hard as you get stronger, which is where the wall runs out.

Will it make my shins bigger, or stop shin splints?

Neither is shown. In the one study that trained the lower leg twice a week for eight weeks and scanned it, strength rose in most groups and the size of this muscle did not change in any of them1. On shin splints, the review that compared leg strength found no difference in maximal strength between people with the condition and people without it2, and the risk factors reported for runners do not include the strength of this one3. The popular claim that it protects your knees has not been tested in a trial either. Train it because you want strong shins, not for those.

How many sets of this should I be doing a week?

Nobody knows, and Reckoner will not invent a number. No dose response study has ever measured this muscle, so it is the one muscle in the library with no weekly volume target of its own. Reckoner would rather leave that gap visible than fill it with a figure somebody made up.

Sources

  1. Psatha, Wu, Gammie and colleagues, BMJ Open Sport and Exercise Medicine, 2017. Age-related changes in the effects of strength training on lower leg muscles in healthy individuals measured using MRI eight weeks of twice weekly lower leg training raised dorsiflexion strength in most groups, and MRI found no change in the size of the tibialis anterior in any age group
  2. Mattock, Steele and Mickle, Sports Medicine Open, 2021. Are Leg Muscle, Tendon and Functional Characteristics Associated with Medial Tibial Stress Syndrome? A Systematic Review no statistically significant difference in maximal voluntary isometric contraction strength between people with medial tibial stress syndrome and controls
  3. Menéndez, Batalla, Prieto, Rodríguez, Crespo and Olmedillas, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2020. Medial Tibial Stress Syndrome in Novice and Recreational Runners: A Systematic Review the risk factors it reports for novice and recreational runners, which are mainly hip and foot alignment and movement ones, and which do not include ankle dorsiflexion strength
  4. Raza, Mabrouk and Kaiser, StatPearls, 2025. Tibial Anterior Compartment Syndrome the tibialis anterior sits in the anterior compartment of the leg, where pressure can rise with overuse, and exercise related shin pain that builds during activity is not a thing to train through