Aleister Black finally made his return to WWE television a few weeks back with a pair of backstage character vignettes, indicating he’ll be taking on a new persona on Friday Night SmackDown. The former NXT Champion has yet to wrestle a match since last October, but took to Instagram on Wednesday to prove that he’s been plenty busy transforming his body in the meantime.
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“For the past 7 months in the lab working with @joshuadfrye who approached my nutrition from a different perspective than I’ve ever done. Especially as a plant based athlete. Starting from a depressed 217lbs to at the lowest 191 lbs. and now back up to 196lbs,” Black wrote. “Working and training online using guidance and seminars from good people like @mmashredded and @liambadco for conditioning. And taking pages from @juggernautcoaching and @fla_hayes for S&C. I’ve never been a physical “monster” but I’ve always pride myself of having the conditioning of a pro.
“I’ve always looked at what I do and dissected it into what is functional Vs. What wouldn’t work for me,” he continued. “As a kid I would find people that would teach me breakdance because it would give me rhythm, athleticism and footwork that I needed for kickboxing that I would later apply to wrestling and Sports Entertainment. This was the same mind set I needed to make some changes. If anything to take away here is whatever you wish to accomplish always dissect what it is made of and strengthen all those attributes so that they enhance the overall goal.”
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Weeks before being pulled off television, Black confirmed in an interview with ComicBook that the heel persona he was slowly starting to show on television was a fraction of his idea for the character.
“I think it was long overdue. I just think that I had a conversation with the Undertaker a while ago, where he said that eventually, you’re going to run into moments where fans need a more humane side, so they can latch onto a little bit more, so that you open yourself up a little bit more for a human emotion that people can latch onto and have a little bit more of an understanding,” Black explained. “Even if that understanding is not necessarily a positive reason, there needs to be a moment where people can go like, ‘I understand him.’ I think that we drifted away from the character too far at one point, that people were confused as to what it is that Aleister Black was and what he was all about, so the character change needed to come. And this was also something that I addressed with them and it was agreed upon, hence the character change.
“We’re still in the stages of producing it a little bit because it didn’t go the way that it was supposed to go, but we got a lot of it out, but not everything and so we’re still steering that ship at the moment,” he added. “I was really excited for it and I hope that with the coming weeks we can create something that has a lot more relatable content to it.”
