Day 1 - November 24th, 2020

Hello, I am someone who wants to participate in sumo wrestling whether that be in the US Sumo open or the less likely chance of partaking in Japanese sumo wrestling. I am a nineteen year old living in the United States and if I want to be serious about this, I have to put in the work. After I was painfully made aware that I was too old and too inexperienced to practice sumo, I got extremely motivated to try anyways. So instead of just an introduction page, I thought it would be smart to also use it as a progress check up. I want to update this thread either daily or weekly with my progress so that I keep at it and not give up. I will also share other things that I steadily learn about sumo.

I just started winter break from college and will dedicate everyday to learning sumo in any way I can. I have been looking at transferring colleges and have found a multitude of options. I can transfer to Portland, Oregon as they have a sumo club an hour away from the campus where I could practice in a better environment. There is another college in California that is nearby the USA Sumo club with Yama and Takeshi, which I feel would be a good learning experience. I have also looked into transferring to a Japanese University but I do not know any Japanese, which is kind of necessary if you want to live in Japan. There are some transfer programs through colleges here that teach in English while being in Japan, but I am not sure if I would be able to join a sumo club at those universities and participate in competitions if it was through a USA school. I could try and learn Japanese and transfer to a Japanese university, but time is not on my side. While I am confident in my learning abilities, I don't think I could become fluent in less than a years time.

Obviously the best case scenario would be getting accepted into a stable, but chances are far from slim apparently. Even so, I have tried emailing a couple stables. I sent an email to the Asakayama beya, but as expected, no response. I have also tried sending an email to the Musashigawa beya, but again, no response as of yet. Hopefully it isn't rude to send an email in English or anything but I thought it would be even more disrespectful to send it in poor Google translate Japanese.

I am not the most athletic of specimens on the planet, so this workout was a struggle. I first did some sumo stretches where I followed along with a video as best as I could.

https://youtu.be/mATc6rc1h64

It turns out I am not very flexible so I might look up more ways to stretch so I can do a full split eventually. I can only move my back forward around the 45 degree mark, so my goal is to be able to touch the ground with my face while doing a full split. After that, I did 50 shiko stomps followed by 30 koshiwari two times. The first set wasn't very hard, but my balance was off a little bit for the shiko. The second set I was really starting to feel it, but still finished. I then did 20 suriashi slides and I definitely need to work on my technique for those. I didn't do the teppo because there isn't really anything like it at my house. I have a boxing bag set up so I might use that tomorrow. Finally, I started the sumo push ups and wakishime. I have almost no upper body strength, so I had to push off of my knees. I hope that I will eventually be able to do a full sumo push up. I did 30 of the push ups and then followed up with 30 of the wakishime. I don't think I would really struggle with the wakishime if I had done it first, but since it was at the end of the workout I had to push myself to keep going. I guess that's the point. The third set of the push ups and wakishime really fell apart and I had to split up the last 30 of the push ups in half so I could take a break. This is even with my knees on the ground. I now know why wrestlers do their kind of shuffle waddle walk after my legs stopped responding to me.