Karrion Kross Discusses How He Avoided Surgery After Nasty Shoulder Injury At Takeover XXX, Admits Rehab Was Difficult

NXT superstar Karrion Kross recently spoke to Sportskeeda about his rehab from his Takeover XXX shoulder injury, which was bad enough that it forced Kross to relinquish the NXT championship shortly after winning it from Keith Lee. Highlights from the interview can be found below.

Says he feels like the injury never even happened and he came out a lot better than he thought he was going to:

“Oh yeah, I feel like the injury never even happened. I came out a lot better than I thought I was going to be out of that situation, but the ligaments completely blew off the bone when that injury happened.”

Admits that rehab was pretty vicious:

“[Rehab] was pretty vicious, I decided to do a lot of extracurricular rehabbing as well on my shoulder. I would go into WWE medical and they would put me through a very rigorous process of rebuilding stability and getting the inflammation down in the joint. When I came home, I would bring all of the equipment that they would give me to use and I would do it three to four times a day.”

How he opted out of surgery:

“It wasn’t necessary to do that, but I wanted to come back as quickly as possible. I was like, ‘there’s no way that’s happening.’ I opted out of surgery, I took a holistic approach. I went on a very clean diet, I changed everything. I put all the time that I would normally put into training into my rehab process and compressed that eight to 12-month window down to three months with no surgery. I’m very proud of that. It was really hard. It was really, really hard.”