Tommaso Ciampa recently appeared as a guest on the Out Of Character with Ryan Satin podcast for an in-depth interview covering all things pro wrestling.
During the discussion, Ciampa commented on how he’s feeling since returning from injury:
“It’s awesome when you don’t have to wrestle. The concern, of course, is when you have to wrestle, so it’s always hard to answer because I feel 100%, like, if I never had to wrestle again, I feel like, oh yeah, I’m gonna live a good healthy life. You enter the bumping, the traveling, you know, flights, car rides, it’s too early for me to say. I only had one match since I came back and it’s probably 100% as far as like, scientific, like healed, but I have no idea what it’s going to do when I start to, you know, test it.”
“I did stem cells when I was out, and really, the results of that have been great. So I’m really hoping that, knock on wood, knock on something, like, that’s a bad injury luck in my career. So I’m really hoping that it’s behind me and I just get like a nice, solid run here of being healthy. That’d be really nice.”
His stem cell treatment:
“I chatted with Rey (Mysterio) and Bobby Lashley. They had both went to a place called BioXcellerator and they just spoke so highly of it. Funny enough I was in the process of signing up for it to actually treat my knees and my shoulders and stuff from prior surgeries, and in the process of me trying to figure out a timeline to go out there, this hip thing happened. The surgery, to me, came out of the blue. I had no idea this was going to happen. So it just ended up lining up in a weird way where it was like, Okay, well, now I’m out for six to nine months rehabbing and I got time. I can go to Columbia whenever I want to. So it timed out in that sense, perfect because oftentimes with the wrestlers, they’ll go get stem cells and they’re back in the ring within one or two weeks. I got the stem cells and I was able to rest for about three months. So it really, I got a real full benefit from it. They say the best of it comes six to twelve months later, so I’m only about four months out right now. So I’m really hoping that it just continues because I feel unbelievable from it. Like, I wasn’t sure it was gonna be a placebo effect of course, but it’s been such a good experience.”
How he got injured:
“Somewhere around the start of 2.0, I started, what would happen is I would take any forward bump, like a power slam, a suplex, anything where I flipped and landed, and I would get this thing where like I would bump and then my left side, my glute, my hamstring, like, it’s hard to even explain. It felt like something that wrapped around from my lower back through the groin and stuff would just kind of go numb and weak. I wouldn’t be able to stand on my left foot at all, but then it would go away. It was temporary. It would stay for like 20 seconds or so, you breathe through it, maybe I’d roll out of the ring or something, and I would carry on.”
“With the NXT 2.0 schedule, especially coming off the pandemic and everything, it was a light schedule, so say that happened in a match on a Tuesday, I might not have a match the next Tuesday. I might get two weeks to rest. I almost wouldn’t even think about it and then it would happen again. That was happening, you know, fairly often. Not enough for me to be alarmed by it though. Then when I started to go on the road and take on that full time schedule and do the live events and stuff, it just got to the point where I was like, Oh crap, this happened Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, and that pain is getting worse and worse and worse.”
“It finally got to a point where we were on a live event and we had tried a lot at this point. I’ve done some injections. I’ve done a lot of treatments and it just happened like, I don’t know, two or three times in one match. I just remember the last one, it was a suplex, I want to say off the second, not even off the top, and when it landed, I just remembered, I think I want to throw up, that exact feeling I had when I tore my ACL. I just kept thinking to myself, like, you just have to get up and stand. That’s all you have to do and just finish it, but that ended up being the last time I was in the ring and that was sometime in September of last year. Then when I finally went to get it fixed.”
“I mean, there’s so much wrong. Like I had bulging discs in my back. The SI joint was closed off. Hip labrum was torn to shreds. A bone was like rubbing up against something. It was just a mess, like the MRI had a lot of language in it I didn’t understand. So the surgery and the rehab wasn’t very fun. I won’t lie. It was kind of miserable at points. When I went out to Colombia, I honestly was at a point where I was like, holy crap, like, a little bit depressed, like a little bit like, I might have had my last match and it was in freakin’ whatever town on a live event, not how I envisioned it being.”
“So the stem cells were really a game changer. Working with the PTs down at the Performance Center just really educated myself about, at 38 years old, like how you have to kind of change up some of your methods and your training and mobility. It was a friggin’ mess, man. It was not a fun time at all. The saving grace was being home with a little one and my wife, a great support system, but it was rough.”
You can check out the complete interview below:
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
