Steph De Lander was dealing with a neck injury for years.
Steph De Lander has been recovering from neck surgery since October, as she underwent a fusion of the C5-C6 vertebrae. De Lander returned on the January 23rd episode of TNA iMPACT!, and she aligned with Mance Warner.
Speaking with Tim Battle on the Battleground Podcast, Steph De Lander was asked about her recovery and how the journey had influenced her in-ring style going forward.
“I’m definitely very ahead of my recovery timeline, which is really cool, I’m very happy about that. As far as how it’s influenced how I’m gonna wrestle when I come back, what I will say is, I initially injured myself like three years ago, when I was at WWE. No one knew the whole time that I’ve been working with this bulging disc in my neck. I would quietly tell my opponents when they wanted to give me piledrivers, ‘Hey, I’m not taking a piledriver, I have a neck injury.’ But for the most part, I just kept it under wraps and I worked through it. So I’ve had this in my head for years of, I need to wrestle as safely as I can because I want to do this for decades, I don’t want to do this for a few years, and then my body gives up. So as I said, I’ve already taken steps where the last few years…I’ve taken one piledriver in my entire career and I’m never gonna take another one ever again. I stopped taking German suplexes. The only person I would let German me was Jordynne Grace. No one else is allowed to give me a high neck bump. There’s certain movements that, in my opinion, the risk just isn’t worth the reward. I did run into that a lot more on the indies than you do on TV because TV, you have producers and people saying no to things, whereas on the indies, everyone can do whatever they want, and they do that. So I had to be a bad guy a lot of the time and just say, ‘I’m not doing that, that’s stupid.’ But then moving forward, there’s a couple of movements that I don’t know if the juice is worth the squeeze anymore. I had a conversation with my surgeon. I was like, ‘These are the moves that I do, and are there any of these that you think it’s not really worth it right now?’ He was like, ‘If you want to wrestle for another 10-20 years, maybe you don’t need to do a Spear single match, or maybe you don’t need to catch a full body weight on your shoulders. Maybe there’s another way you can get around it. But the cool thing about wrestling is, you can modify what you do. I can choose what moves I want to do, what moves I want to take out, what I can come up with instead. So yeah, it’ll take a little bit of time of work-shopping my move set, of what I want the new rendition of my in-ring to be, but this isn’t a new thing for me. I’ve had a neck injury for the last few years, so I’ve definitely already been thinking safely for a while," De Lander said.
Click here to see what De Lander had to say about TNA's partnership with WWE.
Check out De Lander's comments about Chelsea Green here.
Fightful will provide more information about Steph De Lander's recovery as it becomes available.
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