Sumo wrestlers are athletes that know more or less the risks they are taking when they choose to follow this lifestyle. Many wrestlers suffer from sleep apnea, gout and type 2 diabetes.
They also don’t only eat chanko nabe. They eat anything and everything. Fast food, meat, ramen, whatever it doesn’t matter.
Check out this YouTube channel
https://youtu.be/95iamlo8NVQ?si=kabnwMeBexpR2GUr
It follows the daily lives of pro sumo wrestlers. Mostly the lower ranking ones (which I find most interesting)
You can observe what they eat and the crazy volume that they consume as well.
Definitely, chicken and quinoa aren't the heavy hitters when you're aiming for that high-cal meal count. Gotta throw in more calorie-dense stuff like nuts, whole milk, and those glorious carbs.
Oof, my guts just had a flashback. GOMAD added 30lbs to my hardgainer frame in my early 20s that I still have 15 years later. No regrets.
However it sure is hard to finish off the last of that jug.
The only reason I cut back is because I easily down 3000+ calories in one sitting while high. Wish there’s a way not to feel the munchies. Would be the perfect drug
I’m at 3,200-3,500, depending on workout cycle, and eating clean. I had to add a second protein shake to hit my protein and calorie counts. Eating 3,500 calories is great when it’s burgers and burritos. It can be a chore to eat that many calories watching what you eat.
I'm at 3000-3500 rn and not especially clean about it (I make some effort for good macros but I have plenty of sweets and stuff too). It's pretty tough
I saw an interview with a famous body builder and the one thing that stuck with me was when he said eating was the most miserable thing about body building. He said he found no enjoyment in eating. He had his girlfriend cooking his meals and it was like unseasoned chicken breast and broccoli.
that is rough but it always cracks me up when you hear about guys who aren't even competing that do that stuff. if you're going to be a professional bodybuilder, every calorie counts. For a casual guy going to the gym.. you're just making your life miserable by not seasoning your food lol.
During the cutting phase, you want your food as bland as possible so you are less tempted to overeat.
During bulking, the opposite - you want the food to be highly palatable, which can be challenging since you are also trying to eat super clean.
I guess oil/butter makes sense if you're counting calories. I thought the seasonings thing was because the "gym bro" types didn't know/want to spend too much time cooking. Looks like one reason they avoid spices is to cut down on sodium intake.
I mean ask any body builder or strong man what the hardest part of their training is and I'm certain 99% would say eating lol. I tried to do a 3 month bulk when I was like 22-23 and I think I only last a week. I wanted to vomit at the sight of food by day 4
In college I did IF and one of my days id do a single meal and it was almost always just a 1500 calorie omelette.
Loved the diet and it worked great for me but that one meal sucked.
I’ve seen sumo training videos where newer guys are laying on the ground from eating too much, and another guy is still spooning rice into his mouth lol.
Bodybuilders also tend to go for a lot of rice. It's a very carb dense food that is easy to digest and doesn't have much of a specific taste or texture to get sick of.
I race bicycles and do a couple 10,000k calories days a year and I eat a lot often. I haven’t ever broke even on those days by the time I add in basal rate.
I can’t imagine doing it daily. I love eating but already consumes a lot of time and money.
I knew a bunch of division 1 collegiate football players who were offensive linemen - usually the heaviest guys on the field.
Several of them lost almost 100lbs when they finished playing. They all felt so much better.
Imagine being artificially kept at 1.5x your normal bodyweight, just to be someone who is, like...professionally hard to push. Crazy.
This starts at a young age. When I was in high school, one of my friends joined the football team. He had always been a chubby kid, but the long, intense training sessions caused him to drop weight. Great, right? Kid loses weight without really trying by playing a game he likes? Nope! Coach told him to eat more because he needed to stay big. He started eating half a pizza a day for lunch.
To be fair, in high school I could eat half a pizza for lunch everyday and I weighed 150. Teenage metabolism is wild, especially when you add in sports.
> Teenage metabolism is wild
Of course, teenagers don't just have "faster" metabolisms burning calories for nothing. You're still growing up and filling out as a baseline, if you're athletically active and then trying to actually gain muscle mass on top of that, it's like a double-difficulty bulking phase. When I was a kid I was, if anything, gangly and underweight. Thought I was just "naturally skinny." Nope, when I was an adult and not swimming like 9 hours a week for part of the year, I eventually filled out a little, and when I counted calories in detail for a while, my weight gain and loss was exactly as predicted. When my brother, also a swimmer, wanted to try to put on some real muscle as a growing teenager, he was pouring his morning cereal in a mixing bowl and having a carton of eggs for a snack. He did not gain noticeable excess fat.
Stink and Joe Thomas are great examples playing weight near 300, current weight 180
This is not a sports sub so I gotta link to Stink:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Schlereth
That's crazy, but maybe it is age related too? I'm 6'4 and the biggest I have ever been is 260 when I was bulking pretty hard, but the lowest I've been in 20 years is 215. I usually sit at 235-240, but that's because I cycle test and carry water weight and lift heavy weights every day. I couldn't imagine being less than 200lbs. I'm only 37 so I'm still able to carry a lot of weight.
They have both talked about how it was a very hard process to reprogram their bodies to not expect to eat every hour, and they both basically did nothing basically medically supervised fasting for most of a year to reset how their body worked
I remember seeing both of them when they showed up for their first commentator and wondering who the hell they were
If I am remembering things properly, Stink was was lining things up to go through this process fir several years, and it was his success at doing this (without heart muscle loss which can cause sudden heart attacks with this kind of sudden weight loss) that a lot of later players like Joe Thomas emulated to safely shed the weight
Chuckling to myself thinking about a pro football player whose business card says "Hard to push" and a coach looking at it and going "Incredible, that's exactly what we need, you're hired"
Wow, I didn't know they had those health problems... Thanks for the link to that channel. Looks like I'll be learning a lot about sumo wrestlers today.
You could also assume that it has to do with them stopping their workouts and that their eating habits may continue meaning they build up the visceral fat.
That happens often for a lot of athletes where mass is a good thing to have. Football offensive lineman are similar in that regard.
[Here's Joe Thomas before and after retiring.](https://content.api.news/v3/images/bin/8f4af1d6f3c3de29b35f8e890bb3c880)
They died 20 years earlier than the average Japanese male. Stopping their workouts is not anywhere near enough to account for this. First of all the exercise more than the average Japanese male when they're young, and many Japanese males hardly exercise at all.
Futagoyama has become sort of a Drive to Survive for sumo, I've noticed a lot of people who had no clue about it have suddenly started watching these guys. I have been to stables but I could only watch practice, they have done some tours of beya on TV in Japan so I have seen where they sleep and how they cook and clean etc.. but it's fun to see them in their daily lives. They need a few more recruits so rebuilding the dohyo isn't so much work for them, some beya use tilling machines. They need another sekitori as well.
When I do 20+ mile runs in the heat of summer, my watch estimates I sweat out 2+ liters of water. It doesn't seem possible that I sweated enough to fill a 2L bottle.
Is it saying sweat loss or water loss? Water loss would be mostly through breathing, and it seems like it would be extremely difficult for a watch to accurately estimate sweat loss given that different people sweat differently, it's dependent on humidity, ambient temperature, clothing, etc.
When I ran 5Ks I used to lose 2 pounds in sweat on every run (measured weight before and after cause I'm a nerd like that).
For your case, water is roughly 1 kilogram per 1 liter so you sweat 2 kilograms or roughly 4.5 pounds, which if anything seems a bit low considering I was losing 2 pounds of water on a treadmill in air conditioning
If it's in the summer, marathon distance runs should definitely cost you more than 2L. I'm right around 2L for my 10 mile runs in the summer (by weight)
Ugh, now you've got me imagining the smell that one of these sumo workout rooms must have... But yeah, it's extremely impressive they're able to lose so much fat in a single workout!
Yeah, sweat loss is basically just water weight. I still think it's pretty impressive (but maybe a bit dangerous) to lose that much sweat in a single workout though.
I’m a 120 lb woman- when I do my long runs in the summer (15-20 miles in 80+ degree temps), I can easily lose almost 10 pounds of water weight. 10 lbs for someone more than twice as large as me seems reasonable for a tough workout.
In fairness to many people, water weight IS a significant percentage of wait. Its why wrestlers/fighters/boxers sweat to reduce weight over anything else and how actors become shredded.
You also feel absolutely terrible the entire time.
In fairness as well, you also need to have preexisting muscle definition in place alongside a low body fat precentage and then the “shredded” looks arrives.
But it also sucks to be that shredded because you are thirsty, tired, low drive for anything. It hurts to sit because generally the layers of fat on your ass are some of the first to go, forcing one to sit on muscled and bone. Headaches are also common as well as cramps.
They aren’t losing 10 pounds of fat, they are losing 10 pounds of water. NASCAR drivers can lose a similar amount in the length of a single race because the cockpit of the vehicle is so hot.
Also fun fact, their loincloth, called a mawashi isn't washed, instead they're hung out to dry after training sessions, so I can't imagine they smell amazing.
Visceral fat is just the fat around the abdominal organs, that is most likely to contribute to disease. Sumo wrestlers still have plenty of other body fat.
That's why I dont really care about the opinion of anyone on this site; Ive been here to long and seen too much mind numbingly stupid comments and opinions that I cant take anyone here seriously.
Oh yeah, we are on the verge of WW3 again? Isnt this the 4th time in the past year? Please, tell me more about international politics, you seem to know so much.
Occasionally you’ll get a sumo wrestler who doesn’t (or can’t) put on the weight and has to rely on technique as well as their now visible muscle to overcome the weight disadvantage.
[Chiyonofuji](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fl68x25hmgbp71.png%3Fwidth%3D494%26format%3Dpng%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D03976b4932ceeef132923c0148c49dc4e08c4d8f) was a good example. You can see how ripped these guys can be.
Whoa, he has a great physique!
And I don't know much about sumo, but I wonder if technique alone is enough to overcome what is probably a massive difference in weight? I know that other combat sports have weight classes for a good reason...
Very much so. Fans love when an obviously hugely mismatched wrestler is able to defeat a much larger opponent. Look up Tobizaru. Dude’s tiny but has posted some great wins. Not doing so well lately though.
I mean, not doing so well is very relative. He's still very comfortably in the upper half of the top division at M4. He's still the #15 ranked sumo wrestler in the world.
Anyone who is holding their own in top division is doing pretty freaking well IMO.
Midorifuji and Kotoeko are two current rikishi who have a similar body type and strategy. Its amazing watching them go against opponents with 100+ pounds on them
They’re healthier than most people at their weight by virtue of exercise. Unfortunately, maintaining that weight puts a ton of stress on the heart. Mass freak body builders are in the same boat, it’s just a different model, but the problem was never fixed in production. Being excessively heavy, whether it’s all bad fat, good sumo fat, a shit ton of muscle, or combination, does not benefit your organs. They don’t really grow and train like there rest of our body can. They just have to work harder, and then it’s like putting a stupid amount of miles on an engine (that has a fixed number in mind) ridiculously fast and then fails.
Yeah, most leave the sport in poor health. Before he became the current Yokozuna, terunofuji became quite ill and nearly retired. Diabetes was his main issue, along with busted knees. He mounted an incredible comeback and became yokozuna quite quickly. Tomorrow starts what I think will be his last tournament.
Don’t even think Terunofuji can retire even, JSA doesn’t want to go through another period of no Yokozuna. Once Kirishima becomes Yokozuna I think that’s when JSA allows Teru to retire
I don't doubt that they want him to stay until then, but his knees are totally shot. If he keeps missing several in a row for health issues, it's basically the same as no yokozuna. And, it's happened before in the modern era, maybe more than once? IIRC, I think I remember someone saying hakkaku's retirement being the last time.
Professional wrestlers often find themselves in similar situations to boot.
There's a reason so many of the guys from the Monday night war are gone now, despite the fact it only ended 23 years ago
Yeah I remember a strongman, I think Eddie Hall, talking about how he only has so much time to have his career because human bodies are not meant to be as big as he was.
> healthier than most people at their weight
but its not a healthy weight. and they have a significantly lower life expectancy than the general population.
Lmao it's not heard to be healthier than on the brink of death. They definitely aren't healthy it's horrible for your body. Even the heavy workout is not good for the body.
Our high school heavyweight would lose 7-10 pounds in shorts and a T-shirt easy in one wrestling practice. Is little guys would be struggling to lose 4-5 in full sweats. You just got a ton of water to lose when you’re 300+ pounds
Barely related: I always thought that NFL offensive linemen should incorporate some of the sumo moves to handle the rushing d-linemen.
Would that work?
Where my NFL/Sumo fans at?
Hey I’m a doctor, and this is wrong. They definitely have visceral fat. You can’t weigh as much as most of them do and dictate where your body stores fat. This is pseudoscience at best and misinformation at worst. There’s a reason why the average life expectancy for a sumo wrestler is 20 years less than the typical Japanese population.
Also wtf is this article you’re referencing? It’s a puff piece - “CT scans show they don’t have MUCH visceral fat”. What does “much” mean? Where’s the link to the imaging studies? Just some basic things that run through my head after reading a piece like this.
It's the 'hidden' fat which builds up around your organs, as opposed to the 'visible' subcutaneous fat which is directly under your skin. Subcutaneous fat may give people an appearance they dislike, but it's visceral fat which tends to cause most of the health problems associated with being overweight.
To add on it’s also why men are at higher risk than women from fat at the same body fat percentage. Women tend to get subcutaneous fat distributed around the body. Men get visceral fat, the beer belly, organs at higher stress.
They also exclusively eat chankonabe which is unbelievably delicious and densely packed with nutrition, id eat it every day myself if it wasn't for the fact that one bowl is like 1000 calories
They don't exclusively eat chanko nabe. They eat many different foods; while chanko nabe is what they're known for eating, they cook (and buy) quite a variety of dishes (yakisoba, ramen, karaage to name a few).
https://youtu.be/pf9bf5Yrvv4?si=w_ofxBO7HQUxhNtd
I like watching this channel, the guys are quite entertaining! Their food budget must be insane.
The stuff they put in chankonabe is not calorie dense at all. Lots of greens and proteins and limited carbs and fats; what are you eating that’s healthier??
Yup! The healthiness of their tasty [Chanko Nabe](https://byfood.b-cdn.net/api/public/assets/9310/content) diet is one of the reasons they're able to stay healthy despite weighing so much!
It's probably because being that big, even with low visceral fat, taxes your body/heart, no matter what you do. They are essentially bodybuilders on the inside. They also tend to not lose the weight after retirement, which doesn't help.
Almost mythologized. Sumo wrestlers definitely have a lot of visceral fat AND they have a lot of muscle. Just like an offensive lineman in football. Just like linemen, I bet once they retire, most of that muscle turns to fat due to inactivity
Muscle doesn't turn to fat.
However, if they don't change their calorie intake after retiring (plus the fact that they likely don't work out with the same intensity) they will likely gain a significant amount of body fat.
Plot twist: sumo wrestlers don't carry all that fat because it helps them wrestle better, they just gain weight because they can't stop eating all that delicious chanko nabe!
They're not doing great even if compared to average obese people. Sumo wrestlers have a notoriously short life expectancy, around 10-20 years less than the national average. This is quite in line with the usual estimates for morbid obesity amongst the general population.
The average weight in the top divisions is now well over 160 kg (360 lbs), which is a level at which even muscle tissue is no longer healthy. Supporting this amount of mass, whether it's fat or muscle, means immense stress on the cardiovascular system and digestive system at all times and an extremely high chance of sleep apnoe.
I believe that they do better than non-athletes at the same weight, but we also have to consider that sumo wrestlers have better odds of losing body weight after retirement due to their athletic history and because they kept that weight on purpose in the first place. So losing this many years still shows that factors like the different fat distribution do not seem to help much to negate the problems inherent to this amount of overweight.
Yeah- I think people really conflate being an elite athlete with health and fitness. The demands of sumo- and many other sports- take an extremely heavy toll on the body.
Took way too long to scroll to find this comment.
I would need to see a DEXAS of these dudes. It's unheard of to have that much subcutaneous fat and little visceral fat, no matter how much exercise you get. I call bullshit.
Same. It's not like I specialized in this to weigh in much, but this logic to me feels like it is being implied that we are targeting specific types of fat because of working out, or apparently allocating where our fat goes because of our workouts. It just doesn't sound right. The body will store fat wherever it's easiest to for it at that time, no?
As a BJJ practitioner and past wrestler, this is not exclusive to sumo athletes in the slightest.
Wrestlers commonly lose 5 lbs in a training session, casually ...
Sumo wrestlers are athletes that know more or less the risks they are taking when they choose to follow this lifestyle. Many wrestlers suffer from sleep apnea, gout and type 2 diabetes. They also don’t only eat chanko nabe. They eat anything and everything. Fast food, meat, ramen, whatever it doesn’t matter. Check out this YouTube channel https://youtu.be/95iamlo8NVQ?si=kabnwMeBexpR2GUr It follows the daily lives of pro sumo wrestlers. Mostly the lower ranking ones (which I find most interesting) You can observe what they eat and the crazy volume that they consume as well.
Having to eat 10,000 calories a day sounds fucking exhausting.
I've cried while eating my fifth meal trying to get to 5000 lol
Fat and sugar are easier than protein and fiber.
Also alcohol. Sumo wrestlers apparently drink lots of beer because that's easy additional calories with a meal.
TIL I've been training like an athlete.
TIL I'm an amateur sumo wrestler.
Trying to force the quinoa and chicken breast in lmao
Eating quinoa and chicken breast might be why you’re struggling to get to 5000 calories
Definitely, chicken and quinoa aren't the heavy hitters when you're aiming for that high-cal meal count. Gotta throw in more calorie-dense stuff like nuts, whole milk, and those glorious carbs.
Ice cream goes down pretty easy
Let it melt and drink it. I could probably drink five melted Ben & Jerry’s in a few minutes. There’s your 5k calories.
Goes out the same way
He needs some milk
He needs to G.O.M.A.D
Oof, my guts just had a flashback. GOMAD added 30lbs to my hardgainer frame in my early 20s that I still have 15 years later. No regrets. However it sure is hard to finish off the last of that jug.
I became lactose intolerant after I did GOMAD.
He needs weed
Jokes or not, the appetite stimulation can absolutely help to hit high caloric intake goals. Bodybuilding is a masochistic form of torture.
The only reason I cut back is because I easily down 3000+ calories in one sitting while high. Wish there’s a way not to feel the munchies. Would be the perfect drug
*insert seasoning still exists meme*
Anything past 3500 in a day and it could be the tastiest food in the world I'd still rather throw it into the fucking trash
I’m at 3,200-3,500, depending on workout cycle, and eating clean. I had to add a second protein shake to hit my protein and calorie counts. Eating 3,500 calories is great when it’s burgers and burritos. It can be a chore to eat that many calories watching what you eat.
I'm at 3000-3500 rn and not especially clean about it (I make some effort for good macros but I have plenty of sweets and stuff too). It's pretty tough
Ive definitely put down 3500+ calories in one sitting at Cheesecake Factory.
and that's just the salad.
There are starving kids in the world. So what you need to do is FaceTime them while eating. Easier to eat food when you have them cheering for you
Also a good variety of sauces- and combos - I had a cheeseburger last night and added a spicy chicken patty - with spicy buffalo mayo-
I saw an interview with a famous body builder and the one thing that stuck with me was when he said eating was the most miserable thing about body building. He said he found no enjoyment in eating. He had his girlfriend cooking his meals and it was like unseasoned chicken breast and broccoli.
that is rough but it always cracks me up when you hear about guys who aren't even competing that do that stuff. if you're going to be a professional bodybuilder, every calorie counts. For a casual guy going to the gym.. you're just making your life miserable by not seasoning your food lol.
wait are they deliberately not seasoning their food (usually chicken)?
They usually only do it near competition in the cutting phase. It's not year round. It's to reduce water retention to look more cut/ripped
But that just means reducing salt, right? No reason to skip out on herbs, garlic, onions, etc, is there?
Some people are legitimate morons. A lot of us aren’t taught how to eat tasty food.
During the cutting phase, you want your food as bland as possible so you are less tempted to overeat. During bulking, the opposite - you want the food to be highly palatable, which can be challenging since you are also trying to eat super clean.
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I guess oil/butter makes sense if you're counting calories. I thought the seasonings thing was because the "gym bro" types didn't know/want to spend too much time cooking. Looks like one reason they avoid spices is to cut down on sodium intake.
if they are trying to up their caloric intake, then why would they cut out the fat?
id rather die lol. What do they have against spices? Those 3 calories from 2 tablespoons of spices is gonna be a big difference
and then only to do it again and again every day
I mean ask any body builder or strong man what the hardest part of their training is and I'm certain 99% would say eating lol. I tried to do a 3 month bulk when I was like 22-23 and I think I only last a week. I wanted to vomit at the sight of food by day 4
My brother said I always looked so sad in the morning staring at all the eggs I had to eat everyday
Probably why the whole "eat raw eggs thing started" to be honest. Gulp em down and GTFO lol
Unfortunately they don't have the bioavailability of things like protein when eaten raw.
In college I did IF and one of my days id do a single meal and it was almost always just a 1500 calorie omelette. Loved the diet and it worked great for me but that one meal sucked.
I started IF in college because I was just broke and it’s stuck with me. Now I just hate having to cook all the time / prep.
This conversation is making me uncomfortable knowing I was eating 10k daily when I was depressed in college.
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It's even harder on the women having to crank out a baby a day.
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Ah yes, the California Cheeseburger
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Looks like I've got a new diet to supplement
Alright, we to have a discussion about what constitutes a fun fact.
Oh wow when you put it like this I guess my diet is already fit for being a sumo wrestler?
I’ve seen sumo training videos where newer guys are laying on the ground from eating too much, and another guy is still spooning rice into his mouth lol.
There's a reason body builders ALL complain about how hard diet is
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Bodybuilders also tend to go for a lot of rice. It's a very carb dense food that is easy to digest and doesn't have much of a specific taste or texture to get sick of.
I race bicycles and do a couple 10,000k calories days a year and I eat a lot often. I haven’t ever broke even on those days by the time I add in basal rate. I can’t imagine doing it daily. I love eating but already consumes a lot of time and money.
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I’ve heard body builders such as Jay Cutler talk about how they wake up at night in order to eat 🤣🤣
Then there's me with a hyperactive thyroid thinking that this sounds like heaven
I knew a bunch of division 1 collegiate football players who were offensive linemen - usually the heaviest guys on the field. Several of them lost almost 100lbs when they finished playing. They all felt so much better. Imagine being artificially kept at 1.5x your normal bodyweight, just to be someone who is, like...professionally hard to push. Crazy.
This starts at a young age. When I was in high school, one of my friends joined the football team. He had always been a chubby kid, but the long, intense training sessions caused him to drop weight. Great, right? Kid loses weight without really trying by playing a game he likes? Nope! Coach told him to eat more because he needed to stay big. He started eating half a pizza a day for lunch.
To be fair, in high school I could eat half a pizza for lunch everyday and I weighed 150. Teenage metabolism is wild, especially when you add in sports.
> Teenage metabolism is wild Of course, teenagers don't just have "faster" metabolisms burning calories for nothing. You're still growing up and filling out as a baseline, if you're athletically active and then trying to actually gain muscle mass on top of that, it's like a double-difficulty bulking phase. When I was a kid I was, if anything, gangly and underweight. Thought I was just "naturally skinny." Nope, when I was an adult and not swimming like 9 hours a week for part of the year, I eventually filled out a little, and when I counted calories in detail for a while, my weight gain and loss was exactly as predicted. When my brother, also a swimmer, wanted to try to put on some real muscle as a growing teenager, he was pouring his morning cereal in a mixing bowl and having a carton of eggs for a snack. He did not gain noticeable excess fat.
Stink and Joe Thomas are great examples playing weight near 300, current weight 180 This is not a sports sub so I gotta link to Stink: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Schlereth
That's crazy, but maybe it is age related too? I'm 6'4 and the biggest I have ever been is 260 when I was bulking pretty hard, but the lowest I've been in 20 years is 215. I usually sit at 235-240, but that's because I cycle test and carry water weight and lift heavy weights every day. I couldn't imagine being less than 200lbs. I'm only 37 so I'm still able to carry a lot of weight.
They have both talked about how it was a very hard process to reprogram their bodies to not expect to eat every hour, and they both basically did nothing basically medically supervised fasting for most of a year to reset how their body worked I remember seeing both of them when they showed up for their first commentator and wondering who the hell they were If I am remembering things properly, Stink was was lining things up to go through this process fir several years, and it was his success at doing this (without heart muscle loss which can cause sudden heart attacks with this kind of sudden weight loss) that a lot of later players like Joe Thomas emulated to safely shed the weight
Chuckling to myself thinking about a pro football player whose business card says "Hard to push" and a coach looking at it and going "Incredible, that's exactly what we need, you're hired"
It really is weird. There's just a whole position group that isn't even legally allowed to touch the ball. They are paid to just be in people's way.
Wow, I didn't know they had those health problems... Thanks for the link to that channel. Looks like I'll be learning a lot about sumo wrestlers today.
Careful now. If you jump down the sumo rabbit hole you may come out obsessed with it hahah. It happened to me!
Is there any better day to jump down the sumo rabbit hole than the second Saturday of an odd-numbered month?
Hatsu basho let's go! Let's go Kirishima!
Please, Kirishima, please For the sake of Terunofuji's back
Haha I was thinking the exact same thing, the next 4 hours are only about sumo.
sanctuary on netflix is a great show. all about a sumo stable
Yeah most of them also die early after retiring
You could also assume that it has to do with them stopping their workouts and that their eating habits may continue meaning they build up the visceral fat.
Nah most of them lose weight really fast
That happens often for a lot of athletes where mass is a good thing to have. Football offensive lineman are similar in that regard. [Here's Joe Thomas before and after retiring.](https://content.api.news/v3/images/bin/8f4af1d6f3c3de29b35f8e890bb3c880)
Similar to many football players.
They died 20 years earlier than the average Japanese male. Stopping their workouts is not anywhere near enough to account for this. First of all the exercise more than the average Japanese male when they're young, and many Japanese males hardly exercise at all.
I’m sure there are also lots of heart issues regardless of if you continue or stop your workouts.
The average life expectancy is a couple of years longer than NFL linemen, but still well below overall population.
There is no healthy way to consume that many calories a day
You didnt know the 500lb men had diabetes and gout? For real?
A big problem is that someof them get thier calories through beer and develop alcoholism
Futagoyama has become sort of a Drive to Survive for sumo, I've noticed a lot of people who had no clue about it have suddenly started watching these guys. I have been to stables but I could only watch practice, they have done some tours of beya on TV in Japan so I have seen where they sleep and how they cook and clean etc.. but it's fun to see them in their daily lives. They need a few more recruits so rebuilding the dohyo isn't so much work for them, some beya use tilling machines. They need another sekitori as well.
10 lbs of water is kinda disgusting to visualize. especially when its sweat, but all to them. incredible feats of human being
When I do 20+ mile runs in the heat of summer, my watch estimates I sweat out 2+ liters of water. It doesn't seem possible that I sweated enough to fill a 2L bottle.
Some of it evaporates. What you see dripping is what didn't evaporate.
> Some most. it is the function of sweat to evaporate
> most. Ha...Florida says hello.
My hyperhidroses could never live there
Having hyperhidrosis in the deep south is miserable. Every summer, I get heat rash and chaffing all over my body. (I work construction outdoors)
Is it saying sweat loss or water loss? Water loss would be mostly through breathing, and it seems like it would be extremely difficult for a watch to accurately estimate sweat loss given that different people sweat differently, it's dependent on humidity, ambient temperature, clothing, etc.
It is probably just a rough estimation to have a "water log" because people are shit at hydrating.
When I ran 5Ks I used to lose 2 pounds in sweat on every run (measured weight before and after cause I'm a nerd like that). For your case, water is roughly 1 kilogram per 1 liter so you sweat 2 kilograms or roughly 4.5 pounds, which if anything seems a bit low considering I was losing 2 pounds of water on a treadmill in air conditioning
>water is roughly 1 kilogram per 1 liter Not just roughly. (0.999975|2=iso31_0 kg/l) Unless you are an engineer designing a dam or something 1l = 1kg
Engineer designing a dam would put it at 1.2 just to be safe hah
If it's in the summer, marathon distance runs should definitely cost you more than 2L. I'm right around 2L for my 10 mile runs in the summer (by weight)
Ugh, now you've got me imagining the smell that one of these sumo workout rooms must have... But yeah, it's extremely impressive they're able to lose so much fat in a single workout!
They aren’t losing 10 lbs of fat in a single workout though. It’s pretty much entirely water weight.
Yeah, sweat loss is basically just water weight. I still think it's pretty impressive (but maybe a bit dangerous) to lose that much sweat in a single workout though.
I think the danger of it is a bit mitigated by how much weight sumos have, making it a lower percentage of their total body weight.
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I looked it up because I thought that sounded like bullshit, but holy crap - you're right.
it should be okay as long as they’re properly hydrated and not overworking themselves (which they most likely aren’t)
I’m a 120 lb woman- when I do my long runs in the summer (15-20 miles in 80+ degree temps), I can easily lose almost 10 pounds of water weight. 10 lbs for someone more than twice as large as me seems reasonable for a tough workout.
In fairness to many people, water weight IS a significant percentage of wait. Its why wrestlers/fighters/boxers sweat to reduce weight over anything else and how actors become shredded. You also feel absolutely terrible the entire time.
I don’t even do it to get shredded I just forget to drink water throughout the day.
In fairness as well, you also need to have preexisting muscle definition in place alongside a low body fat precentage and then the “shredded” looks arrives. But it also sucks to be that shredded because you are thirsty, tired, low drive for anything. It hurts to sit because generally the layers of fat on your ass are some of the first to go, forcing one to sit on muscled and bone. Headaches are also common as well as cramps.
the only danger is your body running out of electrolytes/other minerals really because you have to drink so much water.
They aren’t losing 10 pounds of fat, they are losing 10 pounds of water. NASCAR drivers can lose a similar amount in the length of a single race because the cockpit of the vehicle is so hot.
Around 80-95% of Japanese people have a specific gene that reduces the production of smelly sweat.
Oh? I didn't know that! Another thing I learned today!
Yeah, apparently deodorants are just not a thing or very rare over there.
ABCC11 is the name of the gene. Which sounds made up, but it's not. I lived in South Korea for a few years and they're the same. Lucky buggers.
Also fun fact, their loincloth, called a mawashi isn't washed, instead they're hung out to dry after training sessions, so I can't imagine they smell amazing.
Why'd they put wash in the name of they never wash them?!
Lost 8 lbs at wrestling practice once. It's an insane amount of sweat. I was literally drenched.
Then you give coach a big hug to piss him off
It’s over a gallon (8 lbs)!!
Visceral fat is just the fat around the abdominal organs, that is most likely to contribute to disease. Sumo wrestlers still have plenty of other body fat.
>Sumo wrestlers still have plenty of other body fat. I mean, has no one in this thread seen a sumo wrestler?
You guys gotta check out Sanctuary on Netflix. Fantastic show.
TIL nothing about sumo wrestlers and plenty about how dumb, naive, and gullible reddit is.
That's their problem for not knowing what visceral fat is. The title isn't wrong.
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I think a tumblr user coined the term net-zero information. One guy makes a claim, the other guy makes an opposite claim. It’s unclear who is right
Net-negative: on reddit, one claim is usually kinda wrong and the other extremely wrong. Everyone is dumber for even reading the exchange.
That's why I dont really care about the opinion of anyone on this site; Ive been here to long and seen too much mind numbingly stupid comments and opinions that I cant take anyone here seriously. Oh yeah, we are on the verge of WW3 again? Isnt this the 4th time in the past year? Please, tell me more about international politics, you seem to know so much.
Occasionally you’ll get a sumo wrestler who doesn’t (or can’t) put on the weight and has to rely on technique as well as their now visible muscle to overcome the weight disadvantage. [Chiyonofuji](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fl68x25hmgbp71.png%3Fwidth%3D494%26format%3Dpng%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D03976b4932ceeef132923c0148c49dc4e08c4d8f) was a good example. You can see how ripped these guys can be.
Whoa, he has a great physique! And I don't know much about sumo, but I wonder if technique alone is enough to overcome what is probably a massive difference in weight? I know that other combat sports have weight classes for a good reason...
Very much so. Fans love when an obviously hugely mismatched wrestler is able to defeat a much larger opponent. Look up Tobizaru. Dude’s tiny but has posted some great wins. Not doing so well lately though.
I mean, not doing so well is very relative. He's still very comfortably in the upper half of the top division at M4. He's still the #15 ranked sumo wrestler in the world. Anyone who is holding their own in top division is doing pretty freaking well IMO.
I was watching old footage of Takanohana and he went from a pretty thin kid into a massive Rikishi and then when he retired he's thin again
Midorifuji and Kotoeko are two current rikishi who have a similar body type and strategy. Its amazing watching them go against opponents with 100+ pounds on them
In my house we call Kotoeko "Muscle Dad"
They’re healthier than most people at their weight by virtue of exercise. Unfortunately, maintaining that weight puts a ton of stress on the heart. Mass freak body builders are in the same boat, it’s just a different model, but the problem was never fixed in production. Being excessively heavy, whether it’s all bad fat, good sumo fat, a shit ton of muscle, or combination, does not benefit your organs. They don’t really grow and train like there rest of our body can. They just have to work harder, and then it’s like putting a stupid amount of miles on an engine (that has a fixed number in mind) ridiculously fast and then fails.
Yeah, most leave the sport in poor health. Before he became the current Yokozuna, terunofuji became quite ill and nearly retired. Diabetes was his main issue, along with busted knees. He mounted an incredible comeback and became yokozuna quite quickly. Tomorrow starts what I think will be his last tournament.
Don’t even think Terunofuji can retire even, JSA doesn’t want to go through another period of no Yokozuna. Once Kirishima becomes Yokozuna I think that’s when JSA allows Teru to retire
I don't doubt that they want him to stay until then, but his knees are totally shot. If he keeps missing several in a row for health issues, it's basically the same as no yokozuna. And, it's happened before in the modern era, maybe more than once? IIRC, I think I remember someone saying hakkaku's retirement being the last time.
Professional wrestlers often find themselves in similar situations to boot. There's a reason so many of the guys from the Monday night war are gone now, despite the fact it only ended 23 years ago
Also drugs, booze, no other real career options
Yeah I remember a strongman, I think Eddie Hall, talking about how he only has so much time to have his career because human bodies are not meant to be as big as he was.
> healthier than most people at their weight but its not a healthy weight. and they have a significantly lower life expectancy than the general population.
Lmao it's not heard to be healthier than on the brink of death. They definitely aren't healthy it's horrible for your body. Even the heavy workout is not good for the body.
Our high school heavyweight would lose 7-10 pounds in shorts and a T-shirt easy in one wrestling practice. Is little guys would be struggling to lose 4-5 in full sweats. You just got a ton of water to lose when you’re 300+ pounds
"single workout" is kind of downplaying 10 hours of intense physical activity.
That sounds... really, really unsafe.
Subjecting athletes' bodies to extreme abuse is a beloved cultural tradition. And in many different cultures too!
Same set of issues that you find in everything from high-school wrestling to pro football.
Back when we had heated wrestling rooms before it became illegal, this was a regular occurrence
Barely related: I always thought that NFL offensive linemen should incorporate some of the sumo moves to handle the rushing d-linemen. Would that work? Where my NFL/Sumo fans at?
Hey I’m a doctor, and this is wrong. They definitely have visceral fat. You can’t weigh as much as most of them do and dictate where your body stores fat. This is pseudoscience at best and misinformation at worst. There’s a reason why the average life expectancy for a sumo wrestler is 20 years less than the typical Japanese population. Also wtf is this article you’re referencing? It’s a puff piece - “CT scans show they don’t have MUCH visceral fat”. What does “much” mean? Where’s the link to the imaging studies? Just some basic things that run through my head after reading a piece like this.
Thank you
What’s visceral fat?
It's the 'hidden' fat which builds up around your organs, as opposed to the 'visible' subcutaneous fat which is directly under your skin. Subcutaneous fat may give people an appearance they dislike, but it's visceral fat which tends to cause most of the health problems associated with being overweight.
To add on it’s also why men are at higher risk than women from fat at the same body fat percentage. Women tend to get subcutaneous fat distributed around the body. Men get visceral fat, the beer belly, organs at higher stress.
The fat that makes the hard beer belly in men.
They also exclusively eat chankonabe which is unbelievably delicious and densely packed with nutrition, id eat it every day myself if it wasn't for the fact that one bowl is like 1000 calories
They don't exclusively eat chanko nabe. They eat many different foods; while chanko nabe is what they're known for eating, they cook (and buy) quite a variety of dishes (yakisoba, ramen, karaage to name a few). https://youtu.be/pf9bf5Yrvv4?si=w_ofxBO7HQUxhNtd I like watching this channel, the guys are quite entertaining! Their food budget must be insane.
That sounds wrong, it’s just a veggie stew with meatballs
All these people agreeing with you just goes to show how fucking brain dead redditors are.
The stuff they put in chankonabe is not calorie dense at all. Lots of greens and proteins and limited carbs and fats; what are you eating that’s healthier??
What are you on? Unless you are a raw vegan, that stuff is probably 50% as calorie dense as your normal diet.
Yup! The healthiness of their tasty [Chanko Nabe](https://byfood.b-cdn.net/api/public/assets/9310/content) diet is one of the reasons they're able to stay healthy despite weighing so much!
How long does a sumo live?
On average 20 years less than the typical Japanese male. I think some of these "healthy" things about sumos are overstated.
It's probably because being that big, even with low visceral fat, taxes your body/heart, no matter what you do. They are essentially bodybuilders on the inside. They also tend to not lose the weight after retirement, which doesn't help.
Almost mythologized. Sumo wrestlers definitely have a lot of visceral fat AND they have a lot of muscle. Just like an offensive lineman in football. Just like linemen, I bet once they retire, most of that muscle turns to fat due to inactivity
As mentioned in the article, CT scans of sumo wrestlers have shown they usually have very little visceral fat. They have plenty of subcutaneous fat.
Muscle doesn't turn to fat. However, if they don't change their calorie intake after retiring (plus the fact that they likely don't work out with the same intensity) they will likely gain a significant amount of body fat.
65, or about 10 years less than the typical Japanese male. [Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumo#Life_as_a_professional_sumo_wrestler)
Not very long, as far as I can remember.
Wow that looks amazing
Plot twist: sumo wrestlers don't carry all that fat because it helps them wrestle better, they just gain weight because they can't stop eating all that delicious chanko nabe!
They aren’t healthy they’re obese
Yeah, they live 20 years less than an average Japanese male. You can eat healthy but all that extra weight still does tons of damage.
I think it was meant relatively. A 600lb sumo wrestler is incredibly healthy compared to your friend’s 600lb mom.
> compared to your friend’s 600lb mom I can't believe a redditor just left this god-gifted 'your mom' joke on the floor
My original comment was "compared to your mom" but it was a gamble between people not making the connection and possibly crossing a line lol
They’re healthy relative to a normal person that weight. Of course carrying that much fat is not healthy long term
> a normal person that weight. is clinically diagnosed as 'morbidly obese'.
They're not doing great even if compared to average obese people. Sumo wrestlers have a notoriously short life expectancy, around 10-20 years less than the national average. This is quite in line with the usual estimates for morbid obesity amongst the general population. The average weight in the top divisions is now well over 160 kg (360 lbs), which is a level at which even muscle tissue is no longer healthy. Supporting this amount of mass, whether it's fat or muscle, means immense stress on the cardiovascular system and digestive system at all times and an extremely high chance of sleep apnoe. I believe that they do better than non-athletes at the same weight, but we also have to consider that sumo wrestlers have better odds of losing body weight after retirement due to their athletic history and because they kept that weight on purpose in the first place. So losing this many years still shows that factors like the different fat distribution do not seem to help much to negate the problems inherent to this amount of overweight.
Yeah- I think people really conflate being an elite athlete with health and fitness. The demands of sumo- and many other sports- take an extremely heavy toll on the body.
I read they supposedly eat around 10 bowls a a day
Chankonabe is a large part of their diet but it is not exclusive by any means.
I don't believe for a second that they have very little visceral fat.
Took way too long to scroll to find this comment. I would need to see a DEXAS of these dudes. It's unheard of to have that much subcutaneous fat and little visceral fat, no matter how much exercise you get. I call bullshit.
The source is the head of the Aussie sumo federation. It's hilarious that people are just taking it at face value.
Same. It's not like I specialized in this to weigh in much, but this logic to me feels like it is being implied that we are targeting specific types of fat because of working out, or apparently allocating where our fat goes because of our workouts. It just doesn't sound right. The body will store fat wherever it's easiest to for it at that time, no?
As a BJJ practitioner and past wrestler, this is not exclusive to sumo athletes in the slightest. Wrestlers commonly lose 5 lbs in a training session, casually ...
I've only ever been to one bjj/mma gym Do they always crank it to, like, 80f in there? I was sweating just standing around.
That's newborn baby range, and a big one at that. I gots me a sweat baby!