Roman Reigns has revealed that he wasn’t anywhere close to 100 percent heading into this year’s Royal Rumble. The WWE star says lingering injuries from Survivor Series threw off his training for months, making it difficult to work out the way he normally would.
Speaking to Men’s Health, Reigns explained that his training isn’t built around a fixed program. Instead, everything depends on how his body is feeling at the time and what kind of wear and tear he’s dealing with from wrestling.
“It’s a total custom job, and I think for each individual it has to be that way, depending on where you’re at within your physical life, you know, what you’ve done athletically, what your job is and what your demand is, and what you’re asking your body to do.”
That means constantly evaluating what’s healthy enough to push and what needs more recovery. Rather than forcing the same workout routine every week, Reigns said he adjusts his training around whatever injuries he’s carrying.
“So, yeah, for me, I think the custom portion comes into: how is my body feeling? What are my injuries? Am I nicked up? Do I have little nagging, you know, things from the ring that are bothering me? So that’s where I have to look at where I’m at in each quarter of the year and, like, this elbow is banged up, but the shoulders are feeling good. So let’s try to—we have to try to target where I feel good and try to push.”
One of the biggest issues came after Survivor Series in November. Reigns revealed that both of his elbows were badly beaten up, and the problems lingered through December before finally starting to improve around the time the Royal Rumble rolled around.
“But sometimes we get to a place where we just feel good, and then we know. And that’s how it happened. My elbows were really beat up in, like, December, coming out of Survivor Series in November. By the time I got to Rumble in January, we were just barely getting them back to normal.”
Those injuries made it nearly impossible for him to train with the intensity he expects from himself. Combined with coming off the holidays and taking a break from strict dieting, Reigns admitted it was one of the tougher stretches of his preparation.
“So my training struggled that whole time, and I was coming out of a non-diet phase too, out of the holidays. So I just couldn’t get to that, like, that intensity and that locked-in focus, just perfect structure, because I was nagged by, you know—I was just hurting.”
Fortunately, once the rehab started paying off, Reigns was finally able to get back into the gym at full speed and rebuild the momentum he’d lost over those months.
“So finally, once we got that all figured out and rehabbed right, started feeling good, started training hard, and now I’m really starting to put it back together.”
Looking back on the experience, Reigns said it’s a reminder that athletes can’t always force their bodies through pain. Instead, he believes learning to recognize when to push and when to recover is one of the biggest keys to staying healthy over the long haul.
“So it’s one of those things that I think you just have to be intuitive. You have to listen to your body. If you’re committed to this and this is an annual thing, you’re running this year-round, you really need to listen to your body and trust it too, because your body’s going to send you signals of when you’re not feeling good.”
Reigns has built a reputation as one of WWE’s toughest performers, but his comments show that even top stars sometimes have to take a step back. For him, getting back to his best wasn’t about pushing through the pain—it was about letting his body recover so he could eventually return to training at full intensity.
Do you think WWE’s schedule makes it too difficult for top stars to stay healthy year-round? Let us know in the comments below.
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