Nearly 30 years have elapsed since Billy Gunn made his debut at the mainstream level of pro wrestling. Although he first soared to superstardom as one half of the tag team known as The New Age Outlaws, a more fitting name for Gunn these days would be The New Age Outlier. That's because Gunnat the ripe old age of 58is the proud owner of a standout physique that puts the muscle development of many other wrestlers to shame.
One reason could be that Gunn keeps good company: He has a great source of high-level knowledge in the form of four-time Mr. Natural Universe Mike OHearn. Gunn also receives a fresh influx of daily motivation by training in the company of his sons, Austin Gunn and Colten Gunn; the three collectively compete on the roster of All Elite Wrestling as The Gunn Club.
So how can the rest of us learn to ascend the mountain of physical perfection into our late 50s and beyond? Gunn was keen to share the same insights with us that enabled him to ultimately live up to his original billing as a Smoking Gunn.
Before I got into WWE I was training horses and doing stuff like that, so working out was never a part of my life. Once I got into the WWE, I realized that if I wanted to do this for a while, I had to start training. I think that was the transformation. When youre doing other things besides wrestling, sometimes weightlifting isnt always in the cards. It was never a big deal to me before that. Even when I played football, it was a thing, but it was never my thing. I never got into it or realized what it could do for me.
By the time I started getting into a full wrestling schedule and running 300 days out of the year, I realized Id better do something to keep myself in some kind of shape so that I dont fall apart. No matter what people say about our sport, it is definitely grueling. Its an everyday thing, and it isnt seasonal. Its not like we go for a couple months and then we have a couple months offwe go from January 1 to January 1. To prepare myself for that, I started asking guys around me for advice, and then going to the gym and just training. Seeing as how Id never done it before, I think once I started doing it, my body could just very quickly respond to it.
I was asking questions to the guys who were always training like Davey Boy Smith, The Godfather, and the Road Warriorsthe guys that you would obviously look at and say, Okay, maybe they know what theyre talking about because theyre 330 pounds and jacked through the roof. But back then, the advice was more along the lines of, Just go in and lift as heavy as you can. I dont think I ever got any great direction. It was really just, Get under this bar and push it until you cant do it any more, then back off, lower the weight and push it again. Then they would give me advice on what to do for each body part, and I would follow it. It wasnt like I had a guru that sat down and gave me training advice.
Honestly, we were traveling so much that the best advice was to simply get in there and get done whatever it was that you could get done, and make the most out of the time you have. That was the big thing they told me: Do what you can in the amount of time you have. Sometimes you had an hour, but sometimes you only had 30 minutes, and youd just go in there and let it rip. Go in there and bang it out.
It was mostly by word of mouth, especially if there wasnt an LA Fitness or a 24-Hour Fitness around. There was usually a gym in every town. Back in the day when we were traveling a bunch, we would fly into a place like Pittsburgh, and then we would do shows in towns that were about two hours in literally every direction. So we would land, get our rental car, get to our hotel, and then we would figure out that we had two hours to get to a gym and train before we had to go wrestle.
We would usually find a gym by word of mouth, especially since we didnt have the technology back then that we have now. Somebody usually knew of an off-the-wall gym that we could go into, and theyd either charge us $10 or let us train for free. Once you start going to those towns more and more, you learn about the gyms that are really good, and then you start writing them down in a book. So if we were in New Orleans we knew we would be going to Valhalla, or if we were in L.A. of course we knew we could go to Venice.
Thats the question of the day, and its a good question. Nowadays, I have a bunch of great people around me that are helping me. Back in the day, my thing with nutrition was never anything like what it is now. It used to drive guys nuts that I could eat anything I wanted and not gain any bad weight. I could eat and eat and eat, and my metabolism would take care of it. Genetics played a pretty good part in it.
Now, everything I do revolves around my nutrition. I am so anal about it. I know for a fact that if my nutrition is not on point, everything else completely falls apart. For me its a pain in the ass, because I take my food and everything I eat during the day on the road with me all the time. I have a big bag for my food; I have a meal-prep lady who puts together all my meals; I take egg whites with me; I take my oatmeal with me; I take everything with me.
I need to do this to maintain what I want to maintain, because Im doing this with my kids and its so much fun. I also dont want to be that guy whos just holding on. If were being honest, ego plays a little part in this. I like what I can do with food. Wrestlers are not bodybuilders; its a whole different world.
Those guys know about nutrition. Now that Ive been in that bodybuilding world, I know how valuable nutrition is. That is my number-one thing, because if my nutrition isnt on point, my trainings not on point, my traveling is miserable, and my everyday life is miserable. Thats how important nutrition is to me now.
It really doesnt. For the first few weeks when you do this for a living, youre super sore, and youre miserable. If I take any time off from doing this, like if I go to a school and train people and then bump, it will affect me. My body is so used to doing this; were professionals and we do this day in and day out and we know what were doing. My body has absorbed all of that.
Once we start saying cant or not able to, those are just excuses.
My training now is scheduled around my traveling. I only train one body part a day. My leg day is on Monday because thats the beginning of my week and Im usually always home on a Monday. Its not that I dont put much effort into the other body parts, but it just doesnt take as much effort to train everything else as it does my legs. Beyond that, I train Monday through Friday, and Ill usually take the weekends off unless I miss a day during the week. I usually dont miss any days, though. Im consistent with everything that I do. I train very specifically for what I do, so I do a lot of mobility training, and I still squat and deadlift. No, I dont do a lot of heavy weights with those because my body doesnt sustain heavy weight that much, but I still like to feel it during those lifts.
I would have to say squatting, because squatting is pretty much a full-body exercise for me. I spend a lot of time doing it. I do a lot of warmups before I get there. I do a lot of singles, and a lot of mobility training for my hips. I front squat and I back squat. Its not a super-heavy weight, but I squat on a 12-inch box all the way down. I do five-second squats. I do a lot of that, because if I dont get that stuff in for some reason, because my schedule is so busy during the week, Im miserable because my body just shuts down. Im older, so my body needs that flexibility. Squatting keeps me moving. Other than that, it would be some back stuff like sumo deadlifts just to get that movement and flexibility in my hips and knees, and it keeps my back strong.
Its those two things that are the most important. If I make excuses not to do them, Ill make excuses not to train at all. Once we start getting older, we start doing that especially in the job that I have. Ive found over the years that guys will say, Hey, Im beat up, so I stopped squatting, or Hey, Im beat up, so I stopped doing back, or Hey, Im beat up, so I started doing only bands.
The next thing you know, theyre doing nothing at all, and now theyre sitting on the couch and theyre miserable because their bodies are attuned to doing that. Thats not me; Im not built that way. Theres something in my brain that will just not allow me to stop doing those exercises. Once we start saying cant or not able to, those are just excuses. Everybody can do it if they want to.
Time has been really good to me. I cant disregard that. I dont feel 58. I just dont. A lot of it has to do with being around my kids. They push me, too, so its not like I can just sit around and do nothing.
No. There is nothing I cant do. I just refuse to say that. That wont even come out of my mouth. I do everything and I will try everything. Im not a person who says, This is my schedule, this is how I do it, and thats just the way it is. Ill try anything. Ill train with bands. Ill train with chains. Ill train with this, and Ill train with that. Ill train with anything, but Ive found what works for me. On Monday I squat. Tuesday is chest. Wednesday is my TV day so its usually arms or something a little easier. Thursday is shoulders. Friday is back, and if I need to do some hamstring stuff on the weekend or something that I didnt get in during the week, Ill just do it then. There is nothing I cannot do. I dont let thoughts like that enter my mind because Ill feel like Im letting myself down.
Yes; I dont do a lot of big stuff or let people dump me on my head. Thats just not a thing for me anymore. I realize that Ive aged a little bit. I also dont do anything off the top rope because that would be too jarring for me, and to be honest I dont want to take anything like that because Im afraid it would mess up my training! *laughs* That goes hand-in-hand with it. I also dont take stuff on my head because I broke my neck in 95, and Im careful with my shoulder because I once tore that in half.
Even though I said I wont do stuff off the top rope, I will do it as long as I have 100 percent trust in the guy thats going to do it to me. Nowadays, a lot of guys just do a bunch of stuff, and they have total disregard for the person theyre doing it to. Theyll just sling themselves on top of people, and thats not the way that I was brought up in the business. That just wont happen. But if Im 100 percent positive that I can trust a guy and that he can do it right, Ill be more than happy to do it.
It would be to get my nutrition on track and ask for help. I didnt do this all on my own. I had help getting me where I am and staying there. Like I said, Im not from the bodybuilding world, but I know somebody whos really good at it. Thats Mike OHearn, and I dont have any problem calling him every single day. As a matter of fact, he just asked me yesterday, Why dont you ever just call to say hello?
Dont be afraid to ask for help, get your nutrition on point, and be very smart with your training. Dont just go in and start slinging a bunch of weight and thinking you need to be the strongest person in the gym. Do stuff that helps you become a better person or makes your body react in the way that you need it to react. I dont need to be a bodybuilder now, but Im very much on that track because I love the results that Im getting, and at 58 I feel better than I did in my 30s. Right now, everything is clicking. Everything is right in line, and if it gets out of line or unadjusted, I have help. I feel part of my big problem before is I would never really ask for help because we as men think that we can figure it out on our own.
I think CT Fletcher said it best when he said he was eating for pleasure and not eating for results. I eat the same things. I finally found the foods that are right for me that process very well, that burn very well, and that do the best for me. That takes patience. That takes time to figure out. For instance, Im a very big white-rice guy.
Also, dont be afraid of carbs. For some reason, people are so afraid of carbs. Theyre really the building block for what we do, especially if youre active and you want everything to be right. Everyone shies away from carbs. Anyone can try any kind of diet on the planet they want to, because if you feel bad and you feel the need to figure things out for yourself that way, go right ahead. What works for me isnt going to work for everybody. Its a very tedious process that takes a very long time. You have to have patience. We cant just change everything all at once, because now you dont know whats working and what isnt working when you have 50 new things youre trying. Youve got to stick with one change at a time and one plan at a time.
Theres also a boring aspect to eating. I dont eat for pleasure. I tried eating like a regular person for about a week and I was miserable. I told my wife I wasnt going to do the meal plan and just eat like a regular guy, and that lasted about two days. And its not like I was eating crazy stuff, but my body couldnt handle it anymore, and I was just miserable. Yes, I do eat things that I like, but its the same things over and over again.
I like to say that Im superhuman, but Im not. I think thats where Mike OHearn comes in. I train with my boys every day when Im at home in Florida, and Mike lives all the way out in L.A. My wife is the greatest person on the planet because she just completely supports me in everything, and this is not an easy life to support. Whenever I feel like Im dragging a bit, shell literally stick me on a plane and send me to Mike for a few days, and I just rejuvenate myself.
Ill train with Mike and those guys at Titan Crew, and its a whole 'nother level. If you cant get into training with those guys, you just need to quit. Its very competitive. Mike is very motivational, and he helps you to get that feeling of wanting to train again.
Yes I get tired of training, and I get tired of traveling, but if I need to Ill just rest for a few hours and then go train. You just have to get it done. You cant make excuses not to. Thats the easy way out. We can all make excuses about what not to do and how not to do it, but the most important thing to do is just to get it done.
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Wrestler Billy Gunn Shared His Training Workout and Diet at 58 - Men's Health
