TNA Wrestling star Steph De Lander recently appeared on the Battleground podcast, where she discussed her recovery from neck surgery and how it will impact her in-ring career.

De Lander provided an encouraging update on her recovery, stating, “I’m definitely very ahead of my recovery timeline, which is really cool, I’m very happy about that.”

Reflecting on her injury, De Lander revealed that she had been wrestling with a bulging disc in her neck for years, dating back to her time in WWE. “I initially injured myself like three years ago, when I was at WWE. No one knew the whole time that I’ve been working with this bulging disc in my neck. I would quietly tell my opponents when they wanted to give me piledrivers, ‘Hey, I’m not taking a piledriver, I have a neck injury.’ But for the most part, I just kept it under wraps and I worked through it.”

Her long-term approach to wrestling has already influenced her move set, as she is committed to protecting her body for longevity in the business. “I need to wrestle as safely as I can because I want to do this for decades, I don’t want to do this for a few years, and then my body gives up. I’ve already taken steps where the last few years, I’ve taken one piledriver in my entire career and I’m never gonna take another one ever again. I stopped taking German suplexes. The only person I would let German me was Jordynne Grace. No one else is allowed to give me a high neck bump.”

Discussing her in-ring future, De Lander shared that some moves are simply not worth the risk, especially when wrestling on the independent circuit. “There’s certain movements that, in my opinion, the risk just isn’t worth the reward. I did run into that a lot more on the indies than you do on TV because TV, you have producers and people saying no to things, whereas on the indies, everyone can do whatever they want, and they do that. So I had to be a bad guy a lot of the time and just say, ‘I’m not doing that, that’s stupid.’”

She also consulted with her surgeon about moves she should avoid to ensure career longevity. “I had a conversation with my surgeon, I was like, ‘These are the moves that I do, and are there any of these that you think it’s not really worth it right now?’ He was like, ‘If you want to wrestle for another 10-20 years, maybe you don’t need to do a Spear single match, or maybe you don’t need to catch a full body weight on your shoulders. Maybe there’s another way you can get around it.’”

Despite the adjustments, De Lander remains optimistic about evolving her wrestling style. “The cool thing about wrestling is, you can modify what you do. I can choose what moves I want to do, what moves I want to take out, what I can come up with instead. So yeah, it’ll take a little bit of time of work-shopping my move set, of what I want the new rendition of my in-ring to be, but this isn’t a new thing for me. I’ve had a neck injury for the last few years, so I’ve definitely already been thinking safely for a while.”

Check out the full Battleground podcast episode featuring Steph De Lander in the video below.