![arthur boorman before](http://althealthworks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/yoga-disabled-veteran-3.jpg)
PHOTOS: DDP
“There is nothing we can do” is the phrase many chronically ill and disabled patients hear from their doctors. Arthur Boorman was no exception.
Arthur injured his legs and knees while serving in the Gulf War; too many jumps as a paratrooper left “irreparable” damage. Not being able to walk unassisted, he gained a lot of weight, and with each year his hope was fleeing.
“Eventually the braces and the canes came, because I could not support myself. I could not move real well,” he said.
Arthur spent 15 years listening to various doctors telling him there was nothing he could do to heal his body.
“They said I should pretty much accept where I was at, that I would never walk normally again. I had…accepted that I was going to die,” he said.
This all changed when Arthur took the matters into his own hands and searched online for anyone who could help him. That is when he came across yoga, but every instructor turned him down – they did not want to work with him. And then he found an unexpected one who was eager to help him.
A Transformational Practice
“The first time I talked with Diamond Dallas Page, he scared the hell out of me,” Arthur admitted.
Diamond Dallas Page (DDP) is not your usual yoga instructor. He is a professional wrestler, who proved doctors wrong in the past. He came into wrestling later than most, at the age of 35, and his career took off when he was 40. But his initial success hit an obstacle early on when DDP injured his back.
His doctors said he was done; his career was over. That’s when his wife at the time suggested that he try yoga. His first reaction was to laugh, after all, yoga is mostly known for its spiritual practices and abundance of female practitioners.
“I wouldn’t be caught dead doing yoga,” DDP admitted thinking.
But because yoga was the only thing he could do at the time, he decided to give it a shot. The practice worked, and in just three weeks he said he felt “mind-blowing” results.
Page started mixing yoga postures with rehabilitation moves he learned, and then he added calisthenics (using body weight for resistance to build strength). Using yoga’s slow burn movement with old-school exercises and making all of them flow together in one practice is what later became DDP Yoga, with DDP’s own DVDs and the book “Yoga for Regular Guys: The Best Damn Workout On The Planet!”
His particular brand of yoga has been lauded as a great cardiovascular workout. As DDP explains, doing slow burn exercises increases the heart rate because the heart works harder to provide blood flow to all the muscles that are engaged. This makes it possible for people to lose weight without having to run, walk, or even move fast. People like Arthur.
![arthur boorman](http://althealthworks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/yoga-disabled-veteran-2.jpg)
Arthur is now unrecognizable. PHOTO: DDP
“If you can’t run, it’s really hard to lose weight. If you can’t run, or bicycle, or walk…But this was something I could do. This was something that would give that cardio workout. This was something that would get my heart rate up,” Arthur said.
That’s why finding DDP Yoga gave Arthur hope, and his results were remarkable:
- After three months, Arthur no longer needed leg braces to walk.
- At the eight-month mark, he could walk normally without any support.
- And at 10 months, he reached his goal: he lost 140 pounds, and he could run again.
Arthur had no surgeries, and took no drugs to achieve this transformation.
“For all the people who want to tell you that things are impossible, that you should settle, specifically to those people who told me I couldn’t, that I was done, that I would never get better, that I would never walk normally again, look at me now,” he said in a DDP video.
“If I can come this far, without surgery, without drugs, without machines, without any of that, what could you do?”
Watch the viral video about Arthur’s transformation:
Other stories of remarkable transformations:
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