WWE: Kevin Nash reveals how wrestling takes its toll, his bad knee
Former WWE superstar Kevin Nash aka Diesel was interviewed by The Miami Herald recently. In order to promote the Florida Supercon event, they published the second part of his interview.
Here are some of the highlights.
His health
"My wife, my son and I went on a European vacation. Three or four days walking around London. Three or four days walking around Paris. Three or four days walking around Munich. My knees were so swollen. My ankle has been operated on. It's got a plate, screws in it. My body just couldn't take walking eight to 10 miles a day. What are you gonna do? Now that you've got the time and you've got the funds to see the world with your family, you don't have a body that can participate in anything. Finally, I just had to tap out. I said, 'I'm going to that little garden over there to sit down in the shade. I'm done.' They came back and got me 2 1/2 hours later, and I was sitting down. I got a chance to see all those places before, so I was a good tour guide, but I was just physically uncapable of putting that much mileage on my knees. I just went up to a wedding in Minnesota and just the travel -- two hours in a car, four hours in a plane. The lodge we were staying at, when we got there after all that travel, I felt like somebody beat me with an aluminum baseball bat. In the plane, the seats are right against my knees. I can't move. I'm sitting there at a 90-degree angle, jammed in my seat. It's miserable...Oh well."
Beginning DDP Yoga soon
"I've read testimonials from people, and he's done some really good things with them. There's a lot of people losing 30 to 40 pounds in 13 to 15 weeks, and that's not water weight. His isn't ballistic, where those Insanity and other things are very ballistic workouts. So if you do have an injury, you can't do the Insanity workout or any of those things because you can't sit there and jump up, do one-arm push-ups. You can't do that stuff if your shoulder is all torn up. The next time I get a chance to see [Diamond] Dallas [Page], he's gonna tailor some things specifically for me. The only thing I'm starting to lose range of motion is in my shoulders because of my rotator cuffs. One of them has been repaired, and the other one is just shredded."
Wrestling taking its toll
"Mick Foley was probably one of the biggest abusers of not taking care of his body. Raising the bar, falling 50 feet through tables and doing all these things, but when you're 35-years-old, your body has some resiliency to it. When you get to be 45, 50, it takes you two hours to get out of bed. We call it the bump card. Your body only has so many bumps in it. I was never a high-flier. I was 340 pounds. I was falling seven feet. You knock me off my feet. I'm seven feet tall. That's my drop, seven feet with 340 pounds of weight going down. That's equivalent of getting rear ended at 30 miles an hour in a car. You do that 12 times a night, 300 days a year, 10 years in a row. [Recently] I got up. Gees, it took me an hour to get out of bed. Just to pick your head up off the pillow, it's miserable. It's a slow process to get moving everyday."
"I was traveling so I didn't get a chance to see [WWE] Money in the Bank, but I was reading the feed on Twitter. Guys getting busted open. Guys doing crazy things. You read some of the comments about it saying fearless,' and that's all great, and that's part of what makes WWE what it is...You have guys go out there and give their bodies and give their souls for the good of the company and for the fanbase... Rey Mysterio was a high-flier all those years, and I think now he's two or three knee surgeries behind me. I think he's had about nine knee surgeries. He's a guy about half my size, and we're sitting at WrestleMania [30] talking, and when we both get up, it's like two 70-year-old women getting up. His style was incredible, but at the same time he's paid dearly for it."