HOUSTON – In an interview Wednesday morning, Texans star defensive end JJ Watt told reporters he’s training normally again after a season-ending injury to his back last year.
He said, “I feel great. It’s obviously – last year was a difficult year, there’s no doubt about it. Going through everything we went through. The one nice thing about the situation is that I’ve had the proper amount of time to take the recovery as methodical as it needs to be and do things the right way and with the proper patience, but with the proper aggressiveness at times and so I think that this recovery process has been very strong because I’ve known the whole time that I have the proper amount of time to do it right.”
He continued, “We’re now past the whole rehab process, past the whole – we’ve transitioned from like a rehab and rebuild to just being an athlete again to now training and really training as an elite athlete again and getting and taking this to the next level. So from this point forward, the off season is really an off season now, so it’s full training, it’s everything, there’s a lot of core work to my workouts just to make sure that I solidify my core and make sure that’s fully locked in and protect my back in the future, but other than that, I’m fully training like I’ve been training in the off seasons, obviously, in a very smart way. I’ve changed my workouts. I’ve tweaked my workouts to make sure that I do everything possible to be smart about the way I do things moving forward.”
Watt underwent back surgery in the off-season last year and then re-injured his back in September 2016. Watt played in each of the Texans' first three games, extending his consecutive games-played streak to 83. At the time, he had never missed a game since he was drafted by the Texans in 2011.