"What am I doing down here?" – Former WWE NXT Champion opens up about major health condition as a youngster

Which NXT Champion had severe health issues as a teenager?
Which NXT Champion a health scare as a teenager?

Former NXT Champion and current AEW star Adam Cole has opened up about a strange health condition he had before becoming a professional wrestler.

Cole has been on the shelf since the Forbidden Door pay-per-view in June 2022, where during the match he sustained a concussion that prevented him from being medically cleared to compete.

He had also been working with a torn labrum for a large part of 2022, but had decided not to have surgery on his injured arm and chose to try and rehab it naturally.

However, those aren't the craziest health scares Adam Cole has had in his career, as the former NXT Champion spoke to Wrestle Buddies about how he began sleepwalking as a teenager.

"I grew out of [sleepwalking], I used to wake up on the floor, sometimes face down when I was like, 15. I was like, What am I doing down here?' ... Sometimes I would wake up mid-conversation with somebody and I'm like, 'Oh, sorry, I'm sleepwalking,' and they're like, 'Yeah, you are. Just go back to bed.' So, I used to do it all the time," said Cole. [H/T Wrestling Inc]

While he may have grown out of his sleepwalking habit, everyone at Sportskeeda Wrestling hopes that Adam Cole can overcome his current injuries and return to the ring sooner rather than later.

Adam Cole is not the only former NXT Champion on the AEW roster

The NXT Championship has only been held by 20 men since its inception in 2012, and at the time of writing, six of those champions are currently on the books at All Elite Wrestling.

Adam Cole is to this day the longest reigning champion of the black-and-gold brand, but Keith Lee is the first man to hold the NXT title and North American Championship at the same time, achieving that goal in 2020.

Elsewhere on the AEW roster, the likes of Andrade El Idolo, Malakai Black and PAC can all boast about being former NXT Champions, but it's the current ROH Television Champion Samoa Joe who can say he's achieved something that no one else has.

Throughout his time in WWE, Samoa Joe became the only man to hold the black-and-gold's main prize on three separate occasions, defeating the likes of Finn Balor, Shinsuke Nakamura, and Karrion Kross along the way.

Who's your favorite NXT Alumni currently in AEW? Let us know in the comments section down below!

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Edited by Jeevak Ambalgi