Shiko: The Leg Stomp, and What It Is For

A man of enormous size lifts one leg out sideways until it is higher than his own waist, holds it, and brings it down hard onto the clay. Then he does the other one. It is the most recognisable image in sumo, and it is doing two jobs at once.

Rituals  ·  5 min read

四股 (shiko) is the name of that movement. You will see it in the ring before a bout, and you would see a great deal more of it if you could watch a morning's training.

Job one: the ritual

The stomp is understood as driving out what is bad in the ground — pressing down whatever should not be there, and settling the earth before a contest is held on it.

That is the same purpose behind the salt, arrived at from a different direction. The salt cleanses the surface; the stomp presses down into it.

Both belong to the same idea, which runs through everything in this section: the ring is not simply a place where a sport happens. It is prepared, and it is treated as prepared.

Job two: the training

Here is the part that surprises people, and it is the more useful half for a viewer.

Shiko is an exercise — and not a warm-up or a stretch tacked on for tradition's sake. It is one of the foundational movements of sumo training, performed in very large numbers, every day, for a wrestler's whole career.

Why this particular movement

Look at what it demands. To lift one leg that high and stay upright, the whole body has to balance over the other one. To come down under control rather than falling, the hips and legs have to hold that weight through the whole descent. And the stance it starts and ends in is low, wide and stable.

Those are the same qualities a bout asks for. As the article on weight classes explains, sumo is won by taking someone's balance and keeping your own — and it is decided at ground level, close to the straw.

So the movement that looks the most ceremonial turns out to be the one training exactly what the sport needs. That is not a coincidence, and it is a good example of something this section keeps running into: in sumo, the ritual and the practical are usually the same object seen from two sides.

Where the ring name comes from

The same 四股 turns up in 四股名 (shikona) — the ring name a wrestler competes under, rather than the name he was born with. The two are connected, and the connection runs through the ritual rather than the exercise.

In the past there was a rite in which the ground was stamped on to drive out the evil spirits and bad influences beneath it. That stamping is the shiko, and the men who performed the rite came to be referred to by a shikona — a "shiko name". The word survives today as the name a wrestler is known by in the ring.

What to watch for

Before the bout, count them. A wrestler will perform shiko more than once during the build-up, alternating legs, in between the salt and the crouches.

Then look at the standing leg rather than the raised one. That is where the work is, and it is the clearest window you get into how much a wrestler's body can actually do.