IMPACT superstar and former world champion Josh Alexander recently joined WrestleZone for an in-depth conversation about his injury, one that kept him out for many months and forced him to relinquish IMPACT’s top prize. He also gives details on his recovery process and reveals when he knew he would be returning at Slammiversary. Highlights from the interview are below.
Says he only knew he would be making his return three days ahead of Slammiversary:
Oh, maybe 72 hours? I knew I was feeling good. I knew I had my appointment with my doctor for the checkup, and he was saying optimistically, the best was mid-July. We of course were in early July, and Scott D’Amore gave me a call a few days before, and he said, ‘We’re going to bring you in here, we’re gonna do this, this, and this.’ I had already been training in-ring as I moved down here to Windsor. So I’d been training in-ring, so Scott had seen me in the ring, trying to get some movements out and see if I still had it and stuff like that. I was feeling good, so we were all very confident in that. Obviously, we held off another month from any in-ring action to kind of give me that buffer zone there, but things are good.
Talks adjusting certain aspects of his game to protect the arm he injured:
Yeah, there’s obvious movements that involve my tricep that would be more strenuous on it that I planned to avoid. But then once you get in the mix with everything, you just kind of fall into those old habits of how it happened. They say it’s like riding a bike. All those things kind of got thrown to the wayside and I just ended up doing them anyway, and it felt fine. It was all just the mental hurdles of wanting to avoid these things, being afraid of these things happening again. As I learned with my neck eight years ago now, when I came back from my neck injury, you can’t really go in with any hesitations and any of those mind-blocks in there because you’re just going to injure yourself elsewhere, you’re gonna compromise yourself somehow. So I just threw it all out there, and it’s been fine.
In a separate interview, Alexander admitted that the injury weighed him down mentally more than it did physically. You can read about that here.
IMPACT Wrestling superstar Josh Alexander recently sat down with WrestleZone to discuss his injury and his return to the ring. Alexander, who was forced to relinquish the IMPACT World Championship due to his injury, revealed that he only knew he would be making his return three days ahead of Slammiversary. He explained that he had been feeling good and had been training in-ring, which gave him confidence in his ability to return. Alexander also discussed the adjustments he has made to his game to protect his injured arm, noting that while he initially planned to avoid certain movements, he ended up falling back into old habits. He emphasized the importance of not going into matches with hesitations or mind-blocks, as this can lead to further injuries. Alexander also opened up about the mental toll his injury took on him, admitting that it weighed him down more mentally than physically.
It is clear that Alexander’s return to the ring at Slammiversary was a triumphant moment for both him and the