Steph De Lander Provides Candid Update on Injury Recovery and Adapting In-Ring Style
As reported by Wrestling News Source, Australian expat Steph De Lander made an appearance alongside ‘Southern Psycho’ Mance Warner on the Battleground podcast, where SDL provided a candid update on her recovery from her reported neck fusion surgery and furthermore what it means for her in-ring career moving forward.
Steph’s update on her recovery from neck surgery was positive advising “I’m definitely very ahead of my recovery timeline , which is really cool, I’m very happy about that.” This tracks with an Instagram post she shared with her 122,000 followers on Instagram on February 12 where with her surgeon in a gable grip head lock/neck hug, she caption the photo “3.5 months post surgery & my surgeon “can’t believe how good my neck looks. I’ll see y’all soon.”
During the interview, Steph De Lander revealed that she had been managing a neck injury for a number of years, which occurred back in her days in a WWE ring, in the form of a bulging disc and this influenced what impact she was willing to put her body through. “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.”
SDL has made appropriate adjustments to her in ring work, with durability to maximise the length of her in-ring career her objective with these changes. “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. 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.”
Moving forward, De Lander was clear that some moves are just simply not worth the potential consequences and this is more prevalent on the independents. “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.’”
Wisely, SDL has also spoken with her surgeon about impacts that she would try and stay away from to achieve the longevity she desires. “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 every 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.’”
Even though these necessary changes had to be made, the malleable nature of professional wrestling means De Lander remains positive about the evolution her move set into one that is both safe and effective. “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.”
The full episode of the Battleground podcast featuring Steph De Lander and Mance Warner is available on YouTube via the link below.
Another bald, bearded wrestling adjacent guy, fantastic…Got into Wrestling thanks to Optus Vision and Turner Classic Movies channel, which aired Nitro, then Foxtel when I finally got to enjoy WWE live each and every week. This evolved into a love of many a different iteration of the artform, but the one I’m passionate about the most is the high level on display across this country – The Australian professional wrestling scene! That’s why I’m here, that and I was far too uncoordinated to ever attempt to do it myself.
