For reason that elude me, health/fitness-twitter has carved out an exception for sumo wrestlers in so far as obesity is concerned. I disagree; you cannot criticize obesity and create an exception for sumo wresters.
Sumo wrestling is the only sport I watch.
I consider it the most unique sport in the world. It is exists in authentic form only in Japan, yet is open to any foreigner who wants to come enter the sumo world.
Wrestlers live in stables, for their entire career. The life of a… https://t.co/pxb6SU1xc3
— AJAC (@AJA_Cortes) March 3, 2025
Japan has a population of 124,000,000 people.
That is 0.0000003%
For comparison, the NFL has 2,240 players under contract during any given year.
That is 0.0006% of the USA population.
The top Sumo wrestlers are genetic freaks amongst freaks
The rarity of something is a poor signifier of how genetically elite it is. By his logic, Mega Millions winners must be freaks among freaks, as there is only one winner out of 300 million people. Controlling for population size, vastly more American boys aspire to play football professionally than Japanese boys aspire to become sumo wrestlers, so the screening effects for talent are so much greater for football than sumo. In Japan, youths are recruited or prodded to become sumo wresters, not that they necessarily want to do it in the same way that American youths dream of playing in the NFL.
Here are some more myths:
“Sumo wrestlers are great athletes”
Not really. Yes, this is subjective, but someone who finishes a marathon at a sub-3-hour time or runs a sub-10-second sprint I would argue is more deserving of the title of athlete than a diaper-wearing fatso attempting to push another fatso out of the boundary of a circle in-between naps and binges. Is there some degree of skill involved in this? Perhaps, but this does not mean it’s the same quality or category as being athletic. For something to qualify as athleticism requires there should be some degree of difficulty involved that precludes the majority of the general population of being able to achieve the same thing, or else it would not be special. But a third of the US population is obese; surely, with the right incentives it would not be hard for a not insignificant number of those people to master the ‘sport’, if sumo even qualifies as that. Two obese people fighting over the remote or a bag of chips I suppose is close enough. Someone ought to just film that and call it sport.
“Sumo wrestlers have tons of muscle, are really strong”
I keep seeing this pop up on Twitter and Reddit, like the tweet below, that sumo wresters are freakishly strong. In reality, they aren’t.
They are God's in Japan, they might be fat but boy oh boy are they strong.
I love watching sumo.— Greg Simmons (@Baldstah) February 26, 2025
MRI studies of obese people show that the extra weight is predominately adipose tissue and enlarged organs, little to none of which is actually surplus muscle. If anything, due to impaired mobility and inactivity, obese people may have less muscle mass and are weaker overall. Of course, sumo wrestlers are more active than your typical sedentary obese person, but given that sumo wrestlers do not train for strength or hypertrophy, like weightlifting, there is little reason to expect that they would have a lot of extra muscle. Instead, sumo wrestlers train for flexibility more so than strength.
Sumo wrestlers also die earlier compared to the general population, consistent with morbidly obese people overall, suggesting there is nothing special about sumo wrestlers in so far as having extra muscle to stave off obesity-related complications later in life, and also inconsistent with the claim of increased athleticism. Moreover, when sumo wrestlers retire and lose the extra fat, they resemble ordinary, regular people, whereas if they had a lot of extra muscle they would more closely resemble bodybuilders, which they don’t. The extra lean body mass according to the FFMI scans is misleading; this is due to the tests being inaccurate (how does one test for FFMI when too fat to fit in the machine) and enlargement of the internal organs, especially the liver in the morbidly obese, not extra muscle.
Sumo wrestlers appear really strong because of how they deftly move the weight of their opponent, but this is due to leverages and torque, not by actually having increased musculature, in much the same way as pushing a heavy door situated on a hinge. The extra weight makes it harder to be moved by one’s opponent from a standing position, not that it facilitates or is a byproduct of strength.
“Sumo wrestlers are treated as gods in Japan, have high status”
Maybe this is true for the Yokozuna, which is the highest rank of sumo wrestling, but the vast majority of competitive-level wrestlers have to take up regular jobs after retiring, again, inconsistent with this mythos that has been built around the sport. Many sumo wrestlers find themselves in poverty after retiring, made worse by health consequences and no real skills except training up-and-coming wrestlers.