Diamond Dallas Page on YRG, Reality TV Plans and Hulk Hogan’s Prediction

Fred: I’m joined by my main man Diamond Dallas Page. We’ve had you a few times on our website. How you doing, man?

Diamond Dallas Page: I’m worn the hell out, brother. I had two serious YRG workouts. The second one had Dante Rivera and Jim Miller. It was like a who’s who of students, and it was pretty intense. I’ll tell you the God’s honest truth, though: That workout wasn’t as hard as the first one, which was supposed to be beginner-intermediate. Everybody in that class had been doing YRG except two people who were new, and the new people were warriors, so I took it to a different level. What’s great about the workout is that at any point, you can lower into the safety zone, take a knee and make it easier. If you’ve done it before, you know how to modify, but a lot of guys didn’t want to check their egos at the door, and they had to work. For me, I’ve always got to be on and engaged, so right now, baby, I’m feeling a little tired.

Fred: Your star pupil, Arthur, who we interviewed a few months back, has had an amazing transformation. What’s he been up to, and how does he continue to inspire people across the country?

Diamond Dallas Page: He’s always on Team YRG. If you’ve never seen his video, you can see it at DiamondDallasPage.com. He’s a disabled veteran who was 297 pounds at 5-foot-6, literally walking on canes for 15 years. At the end of nine months, he was down about 130 pounds and running, and three and a half years later, the guy’s in better shape than I am. He’s 51, and he’s got about a thousand hours of yoga training on top of the YRG, so there’s really nothing he doesn’t know. He took the yoga training just to have it, because he loves research. When he first went to a yoga studio back when he was on canes and 300 pounds, they said, “We don’t know what to do with you.” Enter YRG.

I’ll tell you the God’s honest truth: In the next nine months, I might change the name to DDP’s No Impact Fitness, because I’m so sick of people calling it yoga. There ain’t no yoga workout anything like what I do, and if you’re a yogi, you’d be offended if I told you this was a yoga workout.

Fred: Arthur told me the difference is that yoga forces you into the hard positions, while YRG is a lot more modifiable, so you can adjust it to your own pace.

Diamond Dallas Page: That, and yoga is very peaceful and moving, while YRG is very aggressive and engaging, with dynamic resistance. In yoga, they don’t do Pilates moves, old-school calisthenics, rehabilitation moves or dynamic resistance, so how can I have one out of five and still call it yoga? It’s my fault, because I called it Yoga for Regular Guys. I was producing a book, and they wouldn’t do it as “the YRG workout.” It had to be “Yoga for Regular Guys.” For the first 42 years of my life, I wouldn’t have been caught dead doing yoga. Now I get it. I love yoga, and it’s a great workout. I just don’t teach it. There are probably 90 different forms of yoga, and they all fall under yoga except mine. When people tell me they’re doing my yoga workout, I say, “No, you’re not. You’re doing YRG.”

Fred: The last time we spoke, you were wrapping up filming “Pizza Man” with Frankie Muniz and Roddy Piper. How did that go? You were saying on Twitter a few months back that Frankie Muniz is a lot funnier than people think. Do you feel like he’s underrated?

Diamond Dallas Page: How could they say he’s not funny? The guy had a series for years, and that just doesn’t happen. You’ve got to earn it. It’s like when certain fans say DDP wasn’t that over. When I throw up the Diamond Cutter sign and 20,000 people do it, are you kidding me? You can’t dispute that. Frankie is a really funny guy, and he’s very funny in “Pizza Man.” Hopefully it comes out. The director and the producer are going back and forth in their little drama, so hopefully it all works out, and if it doesn’t, I just keep moving forward, baby. I’ve got a bunch of reality shows I’m looking into right now.

Fred: You were on Carnie Wilson’s show, and you told me you were looking to do your own reality show. How’s that going?

Diamond Dallas Page: That’s something I can control. With Carnie, nobody could control her. She’s a sweetheart, and I love her, but she wasn’t serious, and I’ll never put myself in a position again where someone’s not dead serious. I don’t have time for anyone to waste my time or not get results with my stuff. It was really frustrating, but I just breathed through it, and I got a lot of great footage that shows I could be a hell of a reality star.

We have three reality shows we’re going out with, and Chuck Zito and I have two of them. One we call “Road Dogs,” with me, Chuck, Tank Abbott, Danny Trejo and Evan Seinfeld, who used to be on “Oz” and is also in Biohazard, just a bunch of tattooed-up badasses. Our tagline is “Got a problem?” We help different people with different things, but it’s guy stuff, bikes and cars and fun stuff. It’s so made for Spike, I can’t imagine it not getting picked up. TMZ just did a bit on us this week and called us the real-life Expendables. The other show came about because Chuck has his own dojo now. Here’s a guy who’s the former president of the New York chapter of the Hells Angels, and now he’s helping kids with his mixed martial arts and really making a difference. I told some producer friends, “That’s a show,” and they wanted me in it, too, because of YRG. It’s sort of like “Scared Straight” meets inspiration and perspiration with DDP and Chuck.

But my big baby, the No. 1 thing that’s most important to me, is “Transformation Nation.” I go into a city and take six people of all different lifestyles, colors and creeds, work with each of them individually and follow them for 13 weeks. If we do it in Chicago, we put billboards of these six people all over the city, so everyone knows who they are. If one of them goes and grabs some Twinkies, everybody’s like, “What are you doing?” Their lives are out there, and I’ll only take the people who want it more than anything.

Fred: So it’s like a health version of “The Truman Show.”

Diamond Dallas Page: Exactly. I wouldn’t compare it to “The Biggest Loser,” because that puts you on a fat farm and works you out six hours a day, and that’s not realistic. My show is realistic. If you’re watching and you have the same body type and mimic what they’re doing, you’ll probably get the same results, because they have real jobs, real lives, kids and the whole deal. It’s a 13-week program, and hopefully it’ll happen after the first of the year. In my mind, I’ve already manifested it. It’s on its fifth season already in my mind.

It’s like when Hulk Hogan came up to me in 1994. Before I say this, without Dusty Rhodes, there is no Diamond Dallas Page. Dusty helped me in every which way to get me in that spot. But we were on a tour in Germany, and as I came out of the ring, Hulk pulled me off to the side and said, “How are you doing it? Getting so much better?” He’d just gotten to WCW, and he said, “I watch you on TV, and every time I see you, you do something explosive and make the people believe. They’ve been letting you cultivate your craft on the road like this, right?” I said, “Hulk, the only reason I’m on this tour is because my last name is Falkinburg, this is a German tour and the crowds love their Germans.” And I had a hot-looking wife who walked me to the ring.

Wrestling is a lot like playing the guitar. If you play once in a while, you can learn a song or two, but you never really get good. If you play every day, you can become great, even if you weren’t that good to begin with. Wrestling’s the same way. You’ve got to wrestle all the time. So I’d gone back down to the Power Plant and worked my ass off. I explained this to Hulk, and he didn’t get it, because he was so used to the territories. He said, “Listen, I don’t know how you’re doing it, but whatever you’re doing, keep doing it, because maybe not this year or next year or the year after, but somewhere down the line, you and I could draw huge money together.” Then he walked away, and I was like, “Oh my God, Hulk just said that to me.”

I started manifesting that in my brain, the same way I’ve manifested “Transformation Nation,” “Road Dogs” and the idea for Chuck and me. Four years later, Hulk was on “The Tonight Show” with Dennis Rodman and Jay Leno, and Karl Malone and I walked out, threw the chairs down and threw up the Diamond Cutter sign, and next thing you know, it’s a big face-off. Four years later, it really did manifest right before my very eyes, bigger than I ever dreamed. So I understand the power of manifesting a dream into a reality.

Fred: Let’s give a quick shoutout to your webmaster, Robert McLaren, who works very hard.

Diamond Dallas Page: He’s the man. At DiamondDallasPage.com, you can see my acting site, my speaker site, my wrestler site and the YRG fitness site, where you can get the program. There’s also the Real DDP blog, which I do every Wednesday, Wrestling Wednesdays. If you’re a wrestling fan, subscribe, because I don’t just send you video of me talking. We send the matches, too. Last week, I talked about winning the Television Championship from Renegade. That was a pivotal moment in my career, because it was the first title I was ever awarded, and even though I only had it a month, it didn’t matter.

Fred: Wasn’t that also the year you won Most Improved Wrestler?

Diamond Dallas Page: 1995. That was a big year for me, with a lot of things to come. If you go back to Episode 1, you find out how I put it all together and came up with Diamond Dallas Page. It takes me three episodes to actually be on TV as Diamond Dallas Page in the AWA, and I’ve got video footage to back it up. We’ve also got Team YRG on there, an internet support group where people help each other. My girlfriend and I have started a company that’s going to put out gluten-free, dairy-free, lightly sweetened treats that are delicious, because I want to give people an alternative so they can still eat sweets and have fun. And next August, I’m having a YRG retreat in Mexico. Not New Mexico, Mexico. It’s going to be a hell of a trip.

Fred: DDP, always an inspiration, as always.

Diamond Dallas Page: You know it’s been my pleasure. Bang!