George Kittle talks about his late-season injuries and how he lost nearly 30 pounds

The San Francisco 49ers were without their star tight end this offseason during OTAs and minicamp as George Kittle was recovering from offseason core surgery. On a recent podcast, Kittle revealed that, while he’s on track for a full recovery and will be ready for training camp next month, he lost nearly 30 pounds due to surgery:

“After the Super Bowl, I lost almost 30 pounds. I couldn’t lift. I couldn’t do any upper body because of my shoulder and my rib. And I couldn’t do lower because of my core surgery. I didn’t lift from the Super Bowl until, like, almost mid-march. I went a month without doing anything.”

He said laughing hurt, but sneezing “was the worst” as scar tissue popped. “It was horrible,” Kittle said; he is a little skinnier and needs to gain about ten pounds.

Later on, little did say his shoulder is better than ever, and now he can finally throw a football:

“My shoulder has been messed up since high school. And luckily, I don’t have to throw a football, I’m just blocking, like engaged, so my shoulders don’t bug me too often. But I hurt my shoulder during the Super Bowl. AC sprain chipped a bone. And now that it’s mostly healed, I can now throw a football.

It’s like a kid that gets hit in the head, and you wake up with a superpower. Like, ‘Hey, now I can throw a football.’ It’s unreal. It doesn’t make any sense to me. I started throwing a football, and I can actually zip it. I was like, ‘Oh, that’s what it feels like to throw a football. My labrum doesn’t hurt anymore.”

Kittle spoke more about his injuries, saying, “I was crushed; I had a tough go there for a little bit” after being banged up late in the season:

“I had several things. I don’t know what I’d get the Niners in trouble for. I think we reported everything as it went. But NFC Championship game, the third play of the game, someone stepped on my foot and got rolled up on, so I tore the MCL of my big toe.”

One of the co-hosts asked if it was true that your toe has an MCL, and Kittle said, “It has two, apparently.” George continued, after asking what it feels like when you suffer that injury:

“Walking is not a thing. You’re not doing anything. It’s just stiff. Right after the Super Bowl, I re-fractured a rib and had my shoulder and my toe. I was just laying there after the Super Bowl like, “Holy sh*t, this is going to be a tough bounce back.”

Kittle talked about appearing in the upcoming Netflix series, “RECEIVER.” He said, “It was invasive as you wanted it to be, after mentioning there was a period where the show didn’t come to his house once in over a month.

Kittle did mention that the Netflix crew would follow him home at times, which was “weird” for him. Another time that was strange that Kittle brought up was that the Netflix crew was in his hotel with his wife after a game when the two were trying to decompress. Weird, indeed.

Kittle’s biggest complaint was the length of the series: “You have fives between 18-20 games and eight episodes. I think it needs to be 12 episodes, minimum. Me and Deebo talked about it and were were just like, ‘it’s missing some of the rawness of it.’

Every Thursday, me, Charlie Woerner, Ross Dwelley, and the tight ends coach, Brian Fluery, started this thing called positive Thursdays, and we’d sit there and talk about something positive about the person next to us. I was a huge fan of that, but it didn’t make the show because they were like, ‘We didn’t have enough space for it.’ And I think that’s BS. There’s a ton of footage, but I think it would have been more personable if you have stuff like that.”

Kittle acknowledged that the show is great.