For fear of having chicken legs - I work the gams!

You can do calf raises off the edge of a stair too. Burn city. This gives you the down motion, Verde. It has also been suggested that whenever you walk up the stairs do a calf raise each stair or first stair do 10 and each stair after reduce by one.

I did 6 sets of calf raises with 20 seconds for each rep off the edge of a stair.

Since child hood, I have never owned a pair of knee high boots - they never fit my calves. It's genetics. We girls are built like good old fashion peasant stock - the kind used for pulling the plow since a four legged one wasn't around to do it. I just live with the fact that they are big, big, big even when I'm skinny. No chicken legs on this girl, ever. But they are powerful. Since I walk the stairs every day, I'll start doing some more calf raises going up. That's a measurement I don't normally take. I'll add that to the list since going down in size would be about the only way I'd know if those muscles were in better shape. My mom had calf muscles that a soccer player would love from all the running around the hills of Seattle as a kid. She still had them when she died at 74. But she never wore knee high boots either - they just don't fit.