5 Ways Kenny Omega Became One of the Greatest Pro Wrestlers of All Time

5 Ways Kenny Omega Became One of the Greatest Pro Wrestlers of All Time

Kenny Omega is rightly considered one of the greatest active professional wrestlers in the squared circle, but becoming the best at his chosen craft is a complex path that requires determination, collaboration and innovation. In a rare in-depth interview with the man himself, Muscle & Fitness delved deep into the mind of one of pro wrestling's greatest intellects. What followed was a “money can’t buy” masterclass for anyone who wants to be among the elite in their own field.

To find out where Kenny Omega (real name: Tyson Smith) gets his burning desire to be the best at everything he sets out to do, you have to go back in time to when the award-winning professional wrestler was just 10 years old and starting to play hockey. “I guess I got a late start in Canadian culture,” recalls Omega, who was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba and became a talented goaltender. "I thought I had to work with an incredible deficit because I talked to all the kids at the time and they all said, 'Hey, yeah, I've been skating since I was five or four years old, even 2 years old, so I always felt like I had to catch up in that area,"

It's a feeling of inadequacy that made Omega so uncomfortable that it probably lit the fire in him to be an innovator in anything he tried to do in the future. It appears that the 6-foot superstar, who is now at the top of All Elite Wrestling's television shows and pay-per-view shows as well as a regular appearance for New Japan Pro Wrestling, has been committed to being competitive since he was a child.

Kenny Omega is a versatile athlete

By the time he graduated from high school, Omega was a standout AA hockey player and a member of three different teams. He could have continued in the sport while building his academic education if he hadn't fallen in love with the idea of ​​being a full-time professional wrestler.

“So I originally thought I would pursue physical therapy,” said Omega, who enrolled at the University of Manitoba. During this time, however, Omega's interest in pro wrestling took off, and while the young student enjoyed studying physical therapy, he also turned to the idea of ​​teaching, loving literature, psychology, and film studies.

Omega was selected for the junior hockey league at just 16 years old, but his love for the sport eventually faded when he attended a friend's pro wrestling training session at the Top Rope Wrestling school in Winnipeg and it was here that Omega felt comfortable that he had found his true calling. Over the next few years, Omega developed into a skilled grappler and a highlight of the independent wrestling scene by night, while funding his in-ring experience by day, including a stint at Costco.

Then, in 2005, Omega signed a developmental contract after impressing WWE's talent scouts, which gave him a steady income and the chance to be promoted on primetime TV shows like Monday Night Raw. Nevertheless, Omega decided to leave the WWE after about two years, feeling that in order to become a top star in the industry, he needed to develop his own style and character, breaking away from what he saw as the often micro-management-oriented style of the world's leader in "sports entertainment."

One way Omega would expand his arsenal in professional wrestling after leaving WWE developmental was by taking up Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. “I trained at the Winnipeg Academy of Mixed Martial Arts,” says the fighter. “When I came to Japan for professional wrestling, I trained at the Pancrase Dojo and also the Deep Dojo.” Tyson “Kenny Omega” Smith’s MMA record is 4-3-0 in MMA. Things did even better in professional wrestling, largely because he took the Japanese scene by storm. He was ranked No. 1 on the Pro Wrestling Illustrated 500 in 2018 and 2021. In addition, he has been awarded several Matches of the Year awards and, in addition to the knowledge he has acquired, draws on his love of Japanese video games and popular culture to develop an innovative style in the ring during his film studies, which is considered by many to be a case for the title of "greatest active professional wrestler".

Omega named his signature running high knee strike; The “V-Trigger” pays homage to the powerful moves in “Street Fighter V,” and its “One-Winged Angel” powerbomb driver combo is a nod to “Final Fantasy VII.”

Kenny Omega tries the impossible to keep moving forward

"I think a lot of the sports that I've competed in, where I've really pushed myself, whether it's hockey, whether it's soccer or basketball, I've always chosen the aspect of that sport that I felt was most important and applied to professional wrestling because in the end that was always the end game," Omega shares. "I always wanted to be a professional wrestler. When it comes to being a scorer in hockey back then, you wear 30, 40, 50 pounds of equipment. But I always made it my goal to keep up with the strikers in all the conditioning drills and speed drills. I tried as best I could. And, you know, a lot of times it was impossible because our skates were different, they had flat blades rather than sharp blades, we couldn't do that much “I obviously had an incredible deficit because of how much weight I had, but I wanted to push myself. I wanted to be the best conditioned athlete we had on the team. When I played basketball, I wanted to be very dynamic.

Omega points out that he was even drawn to beach volleyball because it was a great way to train to find the right footing in a wrestling ring, where the mat surface is not solid. “So I knew that if I could find my way and become dynamic and agile in the sand, I could probably be agile in the ring,” says the former AEW and IWGP World Heavyweight Champion.

Kenny Omega rolls with the punches

Of course, chasing those high-adrenaline moments in the ring is risky business, and the toll it takes on the body is unavoidable. "I've had four knee surgeries. I've had hernias in my neck," says Omega, who has also torn his labrum, suffered gastric prolapses and is just beginning to recount the sacrifices he's made to become the best in his field. An avid bodybuilding fan, Omega still loves lifting weights, albeit lighter these days, to "feel the pump," he says, and he also supplements his workouts with daily swimming. Omega says that when training with methods like HIIT, he often uses tempo to construct future wrestling matches. Omega is now back in the ring and feeling great after some much-needed recovery time, but was nevertheless nearly put out of action once again a few weeks ago when he missed with the "V-Trigger" in a steel cage match against Jon Moxley and found himself hanging in his groin from a steel support bar.

Fortunately, despite the scary appearance of the area, Omega was able to survive the blows largely unscathed. “I'm still confused as to how I came to be out of it,” says Omega, who in retrospect feels it was his ability to go with the momentum rather than fight against it that saved the day. “I just let it happen, and I think somehow, miraculously, I was fine because nothing was going against the grain or fighting against this strange event.”

Kenny Omega combines innovation with tradition to keep the masses guessing

Now firmly established as one of the best in the wrestling ring, Omega continues to challenge himself to come up with something new in every single match to keep fans on the edge of their seats. He also brings authenticity to his in-ring performances by using the lessons he learned as a child and by studying people like Bret "Hitman" Hart, who punched an opponent without actually hurting them but made it look to viewers that he had knocked someone's block off. “He had an incredible snap,” observes Omega of Hart’s punches and kicks. It is the appreciation of these small details that separates the greats from the greatest of all time. “As you know, I am not only a professional wrestler, but also an athlete,” says Omega. "It's very important to me to represent pro wrestling in the best possible light. I believe that when we apply our craft, we are among the greatest in the world, and even though there is a lot of showmanship and a lot of performance behind what we do, I believe that is the foundation, the backbone of what should always be an incredible athlete practicing his craft."

Kenny Omega is a team player

Omega tellsM&Fthat it's easy to see why the dojo system has produced some of the greatest professional wrestlers of all time, with Shinsuke Nakamura, Finn Bálor and Jay White cited as relatively recent examples. “It’s very much designed to test your courage,” he says. "In the dojo, you not only train as a professional wrestler, but you also train your body, you train your mind, and you train your teamwork. You train to become a better person; you train to live not only for yourself, but also for your dojo colleagues."

Omega believes the dojo system works so well because some of the workouts, like the endless standing squats (you're expected to start with 500), are so hard that they're designed to make you fail, so your teammates have to pick you up and take you to the end of each exercise. The dojo system in Japan creates unbreakable bonds and this is evident when the athletes even respectfully wash each other's laundry. With encouragement from his peers, Omega increased his 500 squats to 1,000, then to 1,200, and finally to 1,800. This performance made everyone in the class cheer him on to achieve that number, but he did it. “And it was a great feeling,” remembers Omega. “I didn’t feel good the next morning,” he adds jokingly, but says he felt like a great accomplishment had been achieved. "A feeling like I couldn't do this alone as a team. Everyone was with me and lifting me up to get to this place."

Perhaps it is his desire to be part of a team in hockey, basketball and later the Dojo that led him to sign with the newly formed AEW promotion in 2019 as a hot free agent. Despite offers from established companies, including reportedly WWE and Omega, he chose to become part of the AEW team by agreeing to wrestle and also serve as executive vice president. The star has undoubtedly been an integral part of AEW's immense popularity ever since. While Omega's appeal is well established in both Japan and the United States, one can also add England to the list of countries clamoring to see him in action. More than 60,000 seats have already been sold for AEW's "All In" show at Wembley Stadium, scheduled for August 27, and many of those ticket holders are eagerly looking forward to the chance to see the icon. “I've made a few (wrestling) stops in the UK in my travels, but nothing compares to what we're going to do with this Wembley Stadium show,” Omega says. "This is beyond anything I could have imagined for our first UK debut. I don't think you could ever get bigger or better for a first show."

Follow Kenny Omega on Instagram @kennyomegamanx