Ludwig Kaiser appeared as a guest on the latest installment of the wildly popular INSIGHT with Chris Van Vliet podcast for an in-depth interview covering all things pro wrestling and WWE.
During the discussion, the pro wrestling star spoke about his journey to WWE, his insane body transformation and being left off of the WWE Bash in Berlin lineup.
Featured below are some of the highlights from the interview sent to us by Chris Van Vliet himself, where Kaiser touches on these topics with his thoughts. Also below is the complete video archive of their lengthy sit-down discussion.
On how he was signed by WWE: “The story that I’ve heard is that WWE was looking for a German wrestler and they scheduled a tour through Germany to look at talent, go through all the different wrestling schools and stuff. And apparently Mr. William Regal, who I’m always going to be grateful for, saw my name on the list. He knew my dad, they saw my picture, they saw everything, he pointed on me and said cancel the tour, we’ll take him. I was one of the guys actually I never had to do a try-out. Because I was supposed to do one, but two weeks, three weeks before, I blew my knee out. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to say that. I’m not sure if I ever said that [laughs]. But yeah, I got injured and I had to cancel the try-out. So obviously I’m in the match already, I thought oh my God, this is over. Because when I first started this I never thought I would go to WWE. It was not my big goal to be like okay, I gotta go to WWE or otherwise this is all for nothing. No, I wanted to do my dad proud. I wanted to be a professional wrestler. I wanted to see the world. I wanted to do all of that. But now when you’ve got the chance, you want to do it.”
On his insane body transformation: “I’ve been working hard. Every time in my career when I felt like I’m standing still here and I have to do something, because there’s only so many things that are in your hands. There’s only so many things you control in our line of work. My thing was always I gotta make sure all my stuff is on point 11 out of 10. So yeah, I was looking at myself and thought what else can you do? I’m working out a lot, I go in the ring a lot and at this point it was the diet that I could have worked on a little bit. I gotta say too at that point when I lost that much weight I really tried to bulk as well and I really tried to get as many calories in because I worked out hard and stuff. But then yeah, I think 18 weeks with the reverse diet. The reverse diet is basically not going back to the calories that you used to eat. Because you slowly, slowly, slowly go down a little bit, you cut the carbs here a little bit, you cut the calories a little bit. Then you lose weight and when you’re at the point where you are happy with the body fat percentage can slowly go up again. Because your body is so empty, basically it sucks all the nutrients up so good and fuses everything perfectly. But if you all of a sudden, of course starve your body for so many weeks and then go back with 5,000 calories every day, then obviously that’s not going to be good. Everything slowly up, slowly down. Don’t shock your body like that. That worked very, very well for me I gotta say. [Did you work with a nutritionist for that?] I did, a guy from Germany. He used to wrestle as well. I’ve known for a long time and he’s really good at that. So he helped me out. He helped Gunther out. He helped a bunch of the guys out.”
On not being on the Bash in Berlin card: “I did fight for it. I did. There were conversations about it, and it wasn’t really clear if it would happen or not. But again, it’s tough. It’s a PLE. We have so much stuff. If you look at the card that night, it is almost impossible to even get on there. So much star power. And again, we have the greatest superstars in the world. When I look at that card I understand why I wasn’t on that card that night, but I damn well know I will be. I will 100% be. Because Germany showed out that night, and it’s a great market for the company, and yeah it’s my first time there with WWE really. There’s a lot of shows to come, and a lot of opportunities. I can definitely promise you, Ludwig Kaiser is going to use all those.”
For additional highlights from the interview, read our story from earlier today where Ludwig Kaiser talks about possibly using his real-life relationship with Tiffany Stratton on WWE TV.
