Uni gets to grips with professional wrestlers
A NEW project will bring academics and professional wrestlers together to address serious issues around health and wellbeing.
Despite its global popularity, wrestling has a poor record of looking after its performers.
Now, a project led by Loughborough University will tell the stories of 15 men and women working within professional UK wrestling and aims to identify ways of improving health and wellbeing.
Researchers hope key questions:
What are the specific health and wellbeing challenges for professional wrestlers?
What is the existing healthcare provision in wrestling and what are the challenges of delivering healthcare in this context?
How do wrestlers manage the physical and mental health issues routinely experienced in their work?
What is the relationship between the symptoms and the lived experiences of wrestlers and the stories they tell?
Principal investigator Dr Claire Warden, also one of the founding members of Wrestling Resurgence, said she wants to understand what kind of safeguards need to be put in place to protect performers.
She said: “While generations of fans have enjoyed the larger-than-life characters and physical dexterity of professional wrestling across the world, this popular entertainment form has always suffered from issues such as substance abuse, exploitation, excessively long and arduous working hours, and lack of preventative healthcare.
“As both soap opera and athletic contest, underground theatre and test of physical endurance, recent scholarship has shown that wrestling is a liminal form – drawing from many influences. This has meant that wrestling has slipped down the gap to answer four