By Drew McIntyre has been wrestling for 26 years — and somehow, the Scottish Warrior says his body feels better now than it has in more than a decade. The secret, he revealed, was something almost embarrassingly simple: his feet.
Drew McIntyre (Credits: Ringside News)
Built From the Ground Up
Speaking to Stephanie McMahon on her What’s Your Story? podcast, McIntyre opened up about completely rebuilding the way he trains over the past year. The architect of that rebuild is Jeff Black, a trainer whose own story is remarkable: born with brittle bone disease and raised largely in a body cast, Black grew up idolizing Arnold Schwarzenegger and taught himself how to strengthen bones and tendons through years of obsessive study. McIntyre describes him as the angriest, littlest man he has ever met — and one of the most jacked.
“He started reading books about how to strengthen your bones, strengthen your tendons, learned a lot of tricks,” McIntyre said of Black, who eventually started passing those techniques along. The result has been a total rethink of McIntyre’s training, with a huge focus on joint health, prehab, and strengthening the body from the ground up — starting with the foundation he never thought about: his feet.
Balance Problems Solved
The biggest revelation for McIntyre was just how much his feet were holding him back. He had noticed himself feeling strangely off-balance in both everyday life and inside the ring — something his wife had plenty of fun teasing him about. As she put it, he’s “the most unathletic professional athlete in the world,” falling over outside the ring while looking like magic inside it.
Once Black got him rolling his feet out and adding toe raises and calf raises to build from the floor up, things started changing fast. McIntyre really noticed the difference when he stepped back into a wrestling ring and filmed himself running the ropes: barefoot in the ring, he suddenly realized just how much sturdier he felt.
And the timing couldn’t be better. McIntyre is currently sitting at 285 pounds — the heaviest he’s ever been — yet says it’s also the best he has felt in easily 12 years. After more than two and a half decades of bumps, that kind of longevity doesn’t happen by accident. It happens, apparently, one foot roll at a time.
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Source: Ringside News — read the full story there.
