WWE star Natalya Neidhart was the latest guest on the Wilde On podcast to discuss a wide range of topics, including her thoughts on Ronda Rousey’s growth as a wrestler, and how top talent Sasha Banks inspires her to be better. Highlights from the interview are below.
How Sasha Banks inspires her to be better:
She’s [Sasha Banks] somebody that like, whenever she comes to train with me, she’s somebody that’s so inspiring. I love, love, love, love training with her. She always pushes you to wanna be better and she always wants to come up with innovative ideas and she’s truly a student of the game and I think that’s why she’s so good at what she does is because she’s always trying to be better, she’s trying to help the women that she’s working with be better and it’s really cool to see women that love this.
On Ronda Rousey’s growth as a wrestler:
She [Ronda Rousey ], like three-ish years ago when I was first training with her, I found her to be really motivated. She really wanted to learn everything she could about what we did at WWE and you know, she had done Judo and she had done MMA, obviously a pioneer in women’s MMA and somebody that put women in MMA on the map. But you know, she understood pretty fast that WWE and pro wrestling is a whole different animal. It’s not just go there and it’s, you know, you versus your opponent and it’s like hey, you gotta make sure that you have a good relationship with the girls that you’re working because it’s like a dance. It’s not Dancing with the Stars but it’s kind of like… it’s a fight and a dance. It’s you have to be able to gel and trust the people that you’re in there with because you’re giving them your body and they’re giving you their body. I feel like she picked up on it really fast because she had respect. She was always super respectful to me. When we were putting matches together, we had a match on Raw once for Christmas, it was in 2018. In December, we had our only singles match together and long story short, she was really trusting of me. She wasn’t telling me, ‘Hey, I need to look strong’ or, ‘I can’t do this’ or, ‘I don’t think my character can do that.’ She was like, ‘You take the reigns, you tell me what to do, I trust you Nattie’ and she really trusted me to guide her and it made me so happy because we had this phenomenal match, I loved our match together and she trusted me in the sense that she knew I wasn’t gonna let her fall but I was also [going to] shine, make sure that she shined, make sure that I’d shine so that we could have a good story and one of the things I think she’s so good at, I don’t even know if she realizes how good at it she is; she’s really good at selling and I think in order for babyfaces to be really good, to get connected to the audience, they have to know how to sell and Ronda, I think because she’s been through so much in her life, like her childhood was very hard and losing her dad at a very young age, her mom raising her as a single mom, she had a speech impediment until she was like eight or nine and I think she’s been through some really traumatic things in her life so she understands how to dig deep and make people feel something and I think now, even as a mom, you’re seeing a different layer of her.
(H/T and transcribed by Post Wrestling)