Professional wrestling star Trish Stratus is showing off the impressive fitness results of her intense training routine. Stratus, 48, shared a picture of herself posing in front of a mirror, pulling her workout top up to reveal enviable abdominal muscles. “Happy sABturday!” she captioned the post. Stratus has been competing for decades, and is also a certified fitness and yoga instructor—here’s how the star says fit, healthy, and ready to fight.
Stratus first tried hot yoga after getting a herniated disc in her back. “I walked into my first class and it sounds cliché, but even after that first session I knew this was going to be something I would stick with,” she told The Globe and Mail. “I did it every single day for three months. I reversed the damage and was able to go back to my career. I kept up the yoga as well and all of a sudden all of the stress and the physical ailments that used to get to me were gone. My life was still crazy, but I was just so much more capable of dealing with it. I think taking that time every day to disconnect is so important for having perspective. It has made me a better and happier person, no question.”
Stratus keeps a food journal to track her diet, and uses it to log significant events as well. “It’s not like I don’t know what I need to eat to stay healthy and maintain myself, but for some reason there is value in taking the time to write it down,” she told The Globe and Mail. “I guess it brings a sense of awareness and mindfulness in terms of what you’re putting into your body. I see it as a way of checking in with myself as much as controlling my diet. And these days I tend to write about things outside of what I’m eating. If something great happens, like my son Max walks, I’ll write that in my food journal. For a while I tried to keep a diary. That never worked, so now I guess my food journal is sort of a diary.”
Stratus teaches yoga, which she says is perfect for both men and women. “By adding the strength training element to the yoga, you really can get a full body workout because not only are you making your body more flexible, but you are toning and strengthening,” she told Today’s Bride. “It is great to finally answer the question I always get at my yoga studio, which is ‘is yoga even a workout’. Yes – it is! For guys, they can relate to this yoga workout because they recognize and can appreciate the results that can be obtained from the calisthenics included in the DVD, like pushups, squats, lunges, etc. What I see a lot of guys doing is using this system as a complement to their regular gym workouts or using a yoga session for an active rest day.”
Stratus believes it’s very important for wrestlers to play characters authentic to their real personalities. “Pro wrestling is entertainment as much as anything else, so having the personality and being able to play this blown-up version of yourself is an important skill,” she told The Globe and Mail. “Sometimes the writers will create characters that are just totally different from the wrestlers themselves, but the best ones – the ones that have longevity and resonate most with the audience – are almost always when it’s an amped-up version of the actual personality. Like Stone Cold Steve Austin – that is who he is. The Rock, if you meet him, that is the guy. It’s way over the top, but it’s him.”
Stratus is proud of her achievements both in and out of the ring. “I’ve done stuff that I would’ve never imagined,” she told Vibe. “If 2006 Trish Stratus said ‘One day you’ll be in a ladder match. One day you’ll be in a cage match,’ [I’d be] like, ‘What? You’re crazy.’ So to be able to come back and do these unique opportunities, which, I think, [if] we look back, the foundation that [Lita] and I, Molly Holly, Jazz, Victoria, [doing] the stuff that we did, the intention was because one day we can do everything and contribute fully like the guys do.”