I’ve recently started integrating exercises from Sumo into my leg and lower-body workout. They are great for generating a solid base and forward pushing power.
If you are a grappler or involved in pushing sports like American Football and Rugby, then training Sumo-style could benefit you a lot.
The Inspiration
I highly recommend watching either of the videos below and imagine those guys competing in your sport.
Incredibly strong, fast and explosive - they would be very hard to stop in football and rugby, and formidable opponents in just about any martial art.
Both are quite light-weight athletes (for Sumo) and yet incredibly strong. I think they are the most applicable examples for athletes in other sports.
The raw power in their movements, the speed, the rapid change of direction and angle of pushing. And all this despite weighing around 100kg or more.
Although there is a lot of technique involved in Sumo, the thing that is most respected is pushing your opponent out of the ring with sheer force. This is what Sumo is all about.
It sets it apart from other grappling arts like Judo where the objective is quite the opposite - to throw an opponent using minimal strength and refined technique.
This idea of power for ploughing through your opponent is what we will dig into today.
What is power?
Similarities between Olympic Weightlifting and Sumo Wrestling.
As we know from physics, F= ma. Force is mass times acceleration.
In sports terms, we can say that power is a mix of strength and speed. Strength applied quickly is also often called explosiveness.
Olympic weightlifting is an example of another sport that is all about power, not maximal strength. They need explosive strength in order to throw the weights up over their heads. Maximal strength helps a lot, but without explosiveness, you won’t be very successful.
It’s interesting how these two schools of thought — east and west — approach the same idea of generating maximum power. Who does it best? Hard to say, but there are a lot of similarities between Olympic Lifting and Sumo.
Leg and glute training is the most important.
80% of training volume, effort, and energy are spent on leg and glute exercises. Strength works from the bottom up. Like building a tower, you want the foundation to be the most stable. The upper body is almost neglected in comparison.
Emphasis on squats and low lunge stances.
Strength is developed in low positions, including static strength.
Both Sumo wrestlers and weightlifters use a static squat as a “standby” position before exploding into action.
Their muscles (ignoring fat) don’t look like a bodybuilder’s.
After the glutes, the most developed muscle groups are the quads, hamstrings, and then the “corset” — a huge amount of muscle around the lower back and torso which keeps the spine straight. Bodybuilders actively try to avoid this look and prefer a narrow waist.
In American Football, coaches have caught on to the amazing benefits of Olympic-style weightlifting, and athletes will regularly cross-train.
But Sumo has a lot to offer too. Not just for the development of explosiveness, but also the ability to drive forward and put consistent pressure on the opponent in front of them.
The importance of consistent forward pressure in contact sports
This feeling of powerfully pushing through someone in front of you while maintaining good balance and base.
Football and rugby players, for example, need to use that same feeling to push through when being tackled or pulled down. Not necessarily when tackling.
Even when I was doing a lot of kickboxing — a sport you don’t normally associate with pushing, grappling, or even strength — my coach emphasized the importance of constantly advancing against an opponent. Smothering him with relentless attacks while walking forward — forcing him to always be stepping back in an attempt to create space, and putting him on the defensive.
This type of relentless attacking is extremely difficult to keep up — you need to feel a certain rhythm and keep your balance — lean too far forward (like pushing a car) and you will be off-balance and vulnerable.
Obviously, Wrestling, Judo, and other grappling sports would benefit the most from Sumo training. However, in these sports you need to be conscious for a counter-attack — your opponent could use your forward pressure to throw you in the same direction. So, it wouldn’t make sense to use it all the time, but it’s still important to have strong pushing as one of the tools in your arsenal.
The common technique in all sports
In each sport, your technique will differ slightly, but the principles are similar — stay low and maintain a solid base, use the power of your glutes, and ‘pump’ your arms to destabilize your opponent (don’t just keep them locked straight).
All of these principles are central to the sumo training regime. But luckily you don’t need to join a Sumo gym to train like them. Many of the exercises can be done solo.
Sumo training exercises
Sumo training sessions are long and gruelling, lasting up to 3 hours. This means a long warmup or at least an hour, before the actual wrestling begins.
In this first hour, the wrestlers are mostly working on solo drills for strength, balance, and coordination.
Let’s get into it.
1. Sumo Shiko
You might have seen Sumo wrestlers stomping the ground during their pre- fight ritual. This is actually a training exercise called Shiko, and it’s surprisingly difficult, especially when you get to 20+ slow and controlled repetitions.
Sumo wrestlers usually do around 100 to 300 Shiko every training session as a warmup. They are all done in one long set.
Out of all the Sumo exercises I tried, this is the one that I decided to start doing in my regular training sessions. It’s already improved my balance and strengthened my glutes and hamstrings in awkward positions.
It’s also a form of ‘loaded stretching’ , helping to open up the hips to perform the splits. Some Sumo wrestlers can lift their leg entirely vertically when doing Shiko.
Here is Shiko explained by Takeshi Amita. A real Sumo wrestler in Japan.
2. Sumo Suri-Ashi
This is one of the best exercises for us athletes in other sports. It’s basically walking forward while in a deep and wide squat stance. There is also a focus on sliding the feet forward without lifting — to maintain contact with the ground and be prepared to be pushed in any direction.
It’s important to stay low, not bob up and down. Keep a wide base, turn your knees and feet outwards, and go slowly.
You only need about 5 metres of space to practice this.
3. Teppo — pushing
In every Sumo dojo, there is a large wooden column. It doesn’t support the roof, it’s just there for pushing.
A Sumo wrestler will simply push this immovable object without rest for 15 mins or so.
Does this sound kind of dumb to you? What’s interesting is this isn’t the first that I hear of doing this — I had a friend whose grandfather was a special ops officer in the Soviet Union. They were trained in close combat and supposedly very dangerous dudes. So his advice for getting strong was to simply push a wall for half an hour each day. Really giving it your all and imagining that you could actually move the wall.
Sumo have a special technique of pushing. But I recommend experimenting and pushing in a variety of different ways. Try smooth or explosive pushing, pushing a flat wall or a corner, one handed or two hands, and from different stances. The next time you push a person, they will seem light.
4. Push-ups
Yes, even Sumo wrestlers do pushups despite weighing around 150kg on average! If you want to see how that feels, have another person lay down on top of your back, and see how many pushups you can do.
If you want to develop pushing strength, you need to do pushups. No way around it, and no excuses!
5. Lift and carry
This isn’t a traditional Sumo exercise, but it’s something they just have to do a lot when actually wrestling. A common method of winning in Sumo is to simply lift and carry your opponent out of the ring.
The lifting is usually quite a short range of motion. You basically use your belly to handle the weight, arms supporting, extending your legs and sometimes going up on your toes.
Here we see another similarity with the olympic weightlifting concept of ‘triple extension’.
Upper body goes back, hips go forward, knee straightens, ankle extends.
You can practice the sumo style lift and carry by carrying around a sandbag, another person, a kettlebell, or a rucksack.
Sumo wrestlers on weight training
Sumo wrestlers don’t do a lot of weight lifting. It isn’t clear whether they consider it unimportant or whether they simply want to stick to tradition.
I have seen some say that “heavy weights make the muscles too stiff”. It’s a bit of pseudoscience, but regular lifting can indeed cause a lot of tension in the muscles throughout the day. And lactic acid buildup after a hard workout really does make you less mobile (temporarily). Since Sumo wrestlers train daily, they prfer to avoid lactic acid soreness.
That being said, it’s common to see small dumbbells being lifted during warmups. They are usually only 10 kilos or so, not a challenge at all for these big guys. They do a lot of reps with them, often combined into complexes like the curl and press.
One exception to this is Chiyonofuji (featured image of this article). He suffered multiple shoulder dislocations early in his career. His response to this was to work specifically on hypertrophy to add muscle mass in his shoulders. He went on to become a very succesful wrestler. So who knows, maybe one day we will see more Sumo wrestlers lifting?
Enjoy your training, and then eat like a Sumo!
If you want to get strong like a Sumo wrestler, you need to have the diet to support it! I’m not suggesting you get fat, but try out the Sumo soup — Chanko Nabe. Full of delicious vitamins, protein and fats.
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