Ryback admits to taking steroids when he was young.
On his own podcast, Ryback spoke about his experience with performance enhancing drugs and recreational drugs. Ryback first discussed his use of steroids, which he says were suggested to him by former Mr. Olympia Jay Cutler.
“He used to come into Gold’s Gym when I worked at the front desk and I was 19 years old. And at that point, I never touched anything. I was just a 235, 240 pound kid. Just full-time in school, working part-time. And he used to tell me, ‘you should be a bodybuilder. Like, you have good genetics.’ And I would tell him I want to be a pro wrestler. He was actually one of the few guys to initiate a conversation. He was actually the one to kind of put it in my head, ‘maybe I should f*cking do steroids because I have good genetics.' But in my early 20s, I thought that I had to do that to be successful, if that makes sense,” said Ryback.
His other story of drug abuse came from using a substance called GHB. Before 2000, the substance was bought over-the-counter. Ryback discussed Eddie Guerrero and William Regal as two wrestlers who have spoken about their abuse of the drug in the legal days. When Ryback was in FCW, he was still able to get "gallons" of GHB from certain guys.
“A good portion of the guys had their water bottles full of this stuff. And it wasn’t the environment of today, but we would train five days a week and just kill ourselves and go through all of that. And on the weekends and shows, and just, yeah, decompress, have fun, do whatever the fuck we want, drink, and do this GHB, which, eventually, I would do it every day. It became a very regular part of my life, where, for me, it was kind of the first thing I really, truly got addicted to down there. And the training was hard and whatnot and I could sit there and say, oh, I can make up any excuse I want that I did it because of that, but I got addicted to it," said Ryback.
Ryback also discussed the terrible sleepwalking and other side effects he experienced from his GHB abuse. He said the drug was prevalent among the WWE developmental roster at the time.
Ryback's podcast Conversations with The Big Guy is available on audioboom.com.
