His return at the end of AEW Full Gear this past weekend was a thrilling moment for Swerve Strickland’s fans, those invested in AEW’s storylines, and pretty much anyone who bought the PPV and managed to stay up to see it.
In addition to being welcome, Strickland’s return* gave us a tease of the new physique he’s honed while rehabbing from post-Forbidden Door knee surgery the past few months. Swerve has been adding mass for years as he’s re-crafted himself from a cruiserweight into a main eventer,
but having not seen him since August made his gains more noticeable.
Speaking to Fightful’s Grapsody Podcast, Swerve explained how he changed his look:
“I mean, I wanted to be there for like, 15 years of my wrestling career, but that didn’t happen. I didn’t know about the ways of going about it, but like, I was like, ‘Okay, people are seeing my skills already there. What else can I improve on?’ You know me, every year, I always wanted to be like, ‘What are people saying I can’t do? What is something that’s missing? What’s something that’s holding me back?’
“Then I started like, I got a personal trainer, finally, who’s really pushing me. I’m literally thousands of reps in the gym. Sometimes I’m doing sets of 10, 50, to 100 reps in between. So I’m literally hitting the 1000s of whatever workout, whatever movements we’re doing. So it was like a lot of sacrifices, sometimes be three hours in the gym, just going at it, I’m not finished until he says we’re done. Grinding and then eating at certain hours of the day. I’m really just pushing my body because I pushed everything else to the limit as far as I can do it.”
The former AEW World champ also said that his new look has changed how others look at him:
“So now like, Okay, I need to push the body to the next level. Now, people look at me [with] just a whole different energy. Now, there’s a different eye on me.
”Even just walking around the locker room, there’s a different eye on me, people approach me differently. There’s like a little bit more of a presence to myself now. It’s not necessarily I’m imposing. It’s just like, people just look at me with a different type of respect. Because I feel like they see the they know, they understand, and they know the type of discipline it takes to get your body to that. Knowing that I have it in order to do what I did physically. They look at me in a different respect. That’s before I even get in the ring.
“So, they’re like, ‘Oh, we know you hustle and grind with the podcast, and music, and the wrestling, and doing all these things that you’re doing all that stuff, but now your body’s improving, too. Oh man, okay, I got a different type of respect for you now.‘”
Whatever size he is, here’s hoping Swerve can stay healthy. AEW’s more interesting with him around.
* To a new theme done in collaboration with Raekwon of the mf’n Wu-Tang Clan that, cool as that is, will take me a while to get used to.
