Roman Reigns discusses injuries and leukemia during recent interview

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His upcoming turn as Akuma in next month’s Street Fighter movie reboot doesn’t just mean getting to fight The General in insurance commercials… … it also means Joe “Roman Reigns” Anoa’i is doing some rare-for-him press interviews. The big one of those this week was with Ebenezer Samuel, a certified strength and conditioning specialist, and Men’s Journal’s fitness director. As such focused their talk focused on his training routines, physique, and overall health. It led to Reigns discussing a recent injury issue he was dealing with coming out of last year’s Survivor Series WarGames. “[WarGames] is a total custom job and I think for each individual it has to be that way depending on where you’re at within your physical life. You know what you’ve done athletically, what your job is and what your demand and what you’re asking your body to do. “So, yeah for me I think the custom portion comes into how is my body feeling? What are my injuries? Am I nicked up? Do I have a little nagging, things from the ring that are bothering me? So that’s where I have to look at where I’m at in each quarter of the year and like this elbow is banged up, but the shoulders are feeling good. “We have to try to target where I feel good and try to push. But sometimes we get to a place where we just feel good and that’s how it happened. My elbows were really beat up in December coming out of Survivor Series in November. By the time I got to [Royal] Rumble in January, we were just barely getting them back to normal. My training struggled that whole time and I was coming out of a non-diet phase too out of the holidays. “I just couldn’t get to that intensity and that locked in focus just perfect structure because I was nagged by, was just hurting. Finally once we got that all figured out and rehabbed right, started feeling good, started training hard and now I’m really starting to put it back together. So it’s one of those things that I think you just have to be intuitive. You have to listen to your body if you’re committed to this and this is an annual thing. You’re running this year around. You really need to listen to your body and trust it too because your body’s going to send you signals of when you’re not feeling good.” Reigns entered 26th, and worked about 15 minutes en route to winning last year’s Men’s Rumble match in Saudi Arabia. The notion of recovery came up, and Samuel asked Reigns if he’s used or considered peptides. His answer reminds us that while it can be easy to forget while watching his talk crap through a 20-30 minute main event, Joe Anoa’i lives with leukemia. His cancer is in remission for the second time since being diagnosed at age 22, it’s something he has to stay mindful of every day. “Well, with my medical history, I have to be very careful. I’m still to this day down to the wire fighting CML [Chronic Myeloid Leukemia]. “So I have to be very, very careful when it comes to different things like that. Anything invasive, any type of anything like that, I just can’t take a chance on it. So I’ve heard all kinds of cool stuff about that, but I haven’t been able to break into that or sample. “Maybe one day it’ll be a question for my doctor, but I’ve been able to just outwork everything at this point. So if I can keep doing that, then I’ll stay that route for now. “We’re under control and we’re under the actual baseline, but to be in molecular remission, it has to be almost zeroed out and there’s just still those minute traces. But they count. So I still just have to be very careful and very smart, you know what I mean?” Roman Reigns will be back on our screens next Monday, getting ready for his WWE World Heavyweight title defense against LA Knight at Money in the Bank on Oct. 10… and Crown Jewel, and likely another grueling WarGames after that. Stay healthy, OTC.