WWE Star Shares Secrets Behind Ilja Dragunov’s Crazy Training Plan

There are no off days for Ilja Dragunov.

On the October 17 episode of SmackDown, Ilja Dragunov made his shock return to action after more than a year out of action with a serious knee injury.

Dragunov answered Sami Zayn’s United States Championship open challenge and, after a typically hard-hitting battle, he won the gold. In the hours after the match, the Russian star sent a chilling warning to the rest of the roster, saying that anyone who dares step up to face him, pain would be waiting.

Ilja Dragunov Was Putting In The Work

During an appearance on the Joe Vulpis Podcast, Natalya opened up about her work alongside husband TJ Wilson at The Dungeon 2.0. The veteran explained how the training sessions work before expressing her surprise at Dragunov’s work ethic ahead of his recent comeback.

“What we do every week is basically have an actors’ studio, but for wrestlers. So it’s like four hours a week of really high intensity training to get people ready to come back to the ring, or get them polished up or fine tuning, or just people that love doing it.

Angelo Dawkins has been coming for almost four years like clockwork 52 weeks a year. And he’s always ready. He just stays ready.

Ilja Dragunov, he just came back, just won the US Title. Two days before he won the title, he came to our Dungeon and he was working on stuff. He was just pouring sweat. I was watching him work and I was like, I told TJ, ‘I can’t get over Ilja. I can’t get over how good he is.’ He’s so good.

He’s wrestling in our ring with no air conditioning in the middle of nowhere, and he’s wrestling like it’s WrestleMania. And I love that passion.

So everyone in the class was stepping it up that night, they were trying to be so much better because they were so inspired by Ilja.”

Ilja Dragunov made the first successful defence of the United States Title on the October 24 edition of SmackDown, beating Aleister Black. The champion grabbed the win following a distraction by Damian Priest, who was looking for revenge on Black.

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H/t to Wrestle Talk