The goal of professional wrestling is to make fans suspend our disbelief in order to be entertained by the athletic exhibition the performers put on. We are meant to believe that these athletes are beating the hell out of each other over Championships or because they just don’t like each other.
When the match is good enough, we lose ourselves in the performance. We hang on every move, wondering if the next could signify the end of the match. In a case such as this, the performers are doing their job as well as they possibly can.
We are completely immersed, and we don’t think about seemingly innocuous things such as, “Why do wrestlers never sneeze?”
In fact, when was the last time you remember seeing anyone on a wrestling show sneeze, during a promo or a match? It doesn’t happen very often at all, and there’s a simple explanation as to why.
In the simplest terms, the human body won’t allow you to sneeze in such a situation. When you are in the midst of any cardiovascular exercise, the heavy breathing prevents things from tickling the lining of your nose, thus stopping the sneeze.
What about when wrestlers are cutting promos, though? You’ll also hardly ever see someone cutting a promo having to take a break to sneeze. That’s because adrenaline also has a great deal to do with the inability to sneeze.
Adrenaline is a hormone secreted by the glands of the body, usually in times of stress, such as getting prepared to perform in front of a crowd. The main purpose of adrenaline is to open up the airways in the body, temporarily restrict many of its allergy centres and increase blood flow in order to prepare the muscles of the body for physical exertion.
The laboured breathing from the cardiovascular aspect of the matches, combined with the adrenaline being released by the body means that wrestlers’ bodies are too occupied to sneeze, even if they wanted to. Many wrestlers have wrestled while they’ve been dealing with colds, and this is how they can still perform.
Their adrenaline acts as sort of a temporary cure for the cold that they’re trying to fight off.
It’s probably for the best, as Vince McMahon is notorious for how much he hates sneezing. Rather, he can’t stand it when he sneezes Paul Heyman, former WWE writer Dave Lagana and Jim Ross have all told stories about how Vince hates sneezing, because, “there’s no such thing as sick.”
Vince is a notorious control freak and workaholic and when anything gets in the way of his work or he endures something he can’t control, he gets very upset.
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