What It Means When A Professional Wrestler Is Juicing

Professional wrestling has hundreds of insider terms, used to keep the common viewer from knowing exactly what someone might be talking about if they ever encountered them in real life. Kayfabe, shoot, botch, buried, the list is endless, but one that some people might not know is when a wrestler is "juicing."

Juicing is a term that isn't exactly exclusive to professional wrestling, as it used in many different sports, and it's not something that anyone wants to be accused of. If someone is juicing, it means that they are typically taking performance enhancing drugs (PEDs), such anabolic steroids, growth hormones, or antioestrogens. Taking these supplements will usually give an athlete or performer an advantage over someone who is clean as PEDs can boost stamina, increase strength, and make someone have a physique that is comparable to a Greek god. 

However, there are many side effects when it comes to juicing, as the chemicals performers and athletes put in their body can end up causing severe mood swings, erratic behavior, and irreversible damage to their internal organs. 

Many sports have been hit with doping and juicing scandals over the years, with baseball being flooded with people loaded up on steroids to help them play games, and cycling had perhaps the most famous juicing scandal of all time when Lance Armstrong, who won the Tour de France seven years in a row between 1999 and 2005, admitted to taking PEDs, resulting in him losing over $75 million worth of endorsements.

Wrestling has had its fair share of steroid scandals as well, but with things like the WWE Wellness Program, wrestlers are encouraged now more than ever to embrace clean living, with steroid users being punished with fines, suspensions, and even losing their jobs at certain companies if they are found out.

There is a second meaning to the term juicing in professional wrestling, one that is not only still used to this day, but has become more and more prominent on the biggest stages in recent years. Juicing is simply another term to describe intentionally bleeding in a wrestling match, which can be done by causing a gash or laceration legitimately (the hard way), or by running a razor blade or any type of sharp object across someone's forehead (blading). 

Bleeding, juicing, spilling the red stuff, whatever one wants to call it, has made a significant comeback in major companies like WWE and AEW over the past few years, with some of AEW's most memorable and viral moments since its inception heavily revolving around how violent the company can be at certain times. There has been Hangman Page literally drinking Swerve Strickland's blood at Full Gear 2023, Jon Moxley getting a spiked bat stuck in his back earlier this year, and the street fight that saw Anna Jay and Tay Conti take on The Bunny and Penelope Ford being so violent that WWE themselves called the bout "gory mutilation."

With that said, WWE has allowed their wrestlers to juice on a more frequent basis since Vince McMahon originally retired in 2022, with Cody Rhodes in particular bleeding heavily in two of the most memorable moments of the modern era. Those moments were on the road to WrestleMania 40 when he was beaten to a bloody pulp by The Rock, and then at the 2025 Elimination Chamber event when John Cena turned heel.

This type of juicing isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it is, ironically, a lot safer than injecting steroids into someone's body on a weekly basis. After all, you can stitch a wound on someone's head shut, but you can't make someone's heart smaller after it's become enlarged due to years of steroid abuse.