Tommaso Ciampa was given decent notice about his surprise return to WWE RAW last month.
WWE Superstar Tommaso Ciampa was a recent guest on Out of Character with Ryan Satin. Ciampa said he was given about three weeks’ notice to return from injury. He said this timeframe gave him time to get in even better shape.
“I was given the green light, maybe three weeks prior,” Tommaso Ciampa recalled. “I flew out to Albany to kind of have my last checkup with all the medical and stuff. And then it just kind of was just a waiting game of creatively having something to do. So I think it was like three weeks. It’s kind of nice too, because it gave me like three extra weeks of kind of intense dieting. So I felt like I came back in kind of better shape than I envisioned. So yeah, I think it was about three weeks, though.”
When asked about his body transformation between NXT and now, Ciampa addressed his physical journey and said he now feels like a 21-year-old version of himself.
“When I started with NXT, I could hardly do push-ups,” Tommaso Ciampa revealed. “My shoulders were so jacked up. Even when I signed with NXT, I remember we knew already, like one of them, both had to be fixed. But one like had to be fixed. It just was that thing of where you have the discussion with everybody of like, ‘Hey, so I can get by, and we’re not at higher risk, what’s done is already done.’
The Right Window
“But it was like; we’ll wait for the right window to fix it. When I tore my knee in that ladder match with AOP and DIY, that was like okay, well now, I’m out for nine months. I had the shoulders fixed too at the same time. So that was really when everything changed for me physically, because I just remember, five, six months after my ACL surgery being like holy crap, I can lift, I can press overhead, I can chest press, I can do push-ups.
“It’s just like all of a sudden I was like, Oh, I feel like a 21-year-old version of me. And I just knew at that time, that’s when Johnny [Gargano] had a crazy transformation. He got a nutritionist that he hooked up with, so I hooked up with the same nutritionist, but that’s really what it was. It was the time off with those injuries and being able to physically train properly and then having the nutritionist help me and guide me because I never really understood how to do the food part on my own.
“But yeah, it’s night and day if you look back to early DIY or even like Ring of Honor or something compared to now. I’m super proud of the transformation because, in my head, I’ve always been a body guy. So yeah, it takes a lot of freaking work.”
READ MORE: Tommaso Ciampa Would Be 100% If He Didn’t Have To Wrestle
What do you make of Tommaso Ciampa’s comments? Are you happy to have him back on WWE RAW? Let us know your thoughts by sounding off in the comments section below.
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