Yoga for Regular Guys: The Best Damn Workout on the Planet!

techniques not only when doing Yoga for Regular Guys, but also when you need to calm down, focus, and de-stress. Hundreds of books have been written on the subject. In this book we will touch on the importance of the breath while doing yoga.
    If you’re not breathing correctly or not breathing at all while doing yoga, all you’re doing is stretching, and according to many experts, stretching will only get you so far. But when you stretch and move in concert with your breath, you are doing yoga, which is a total body exercise. And when you’re doing yoga properly, you’re gaining physical and mental focus, balance, endurance, flexibility, and power. How important is breathing to us? Remember, you can go without food for weeks. You can go without water for days. But if you go without oxygen for more than a few minutes, it’s curtains—sudden death without the overtime—fade to black.
    It All Starts with Your First Breath
    YOGA-DOC SAYS …
    At birth, the first thing the doctor does is to check the many aspects of a newborn child’s respiration with an “APGAR” score that measures the baby’s heart rate, respiratory effort, muscle tone, response to stimuli, and skin color. These five indicators all relate to a newborn’s ability to breathe and properly utilize oxygen. The old saying goes, you know that your newborn is healthy if it comes out kicking and screaming.
    As Regular Guys, we also know that the reason we came out kicking and screaming is because at the time of birth, we knew that we just left a warm, soft, and wonderful place that we were going to spend a major part of our lives trying to hump, dive, or climb back into! (Now I don’t care who you are, that was some funny shit right there.)
    Healthy babies breathe into their whole lung fields, from the belly to the collarbones. When we breathe this way in our yoga workouts, we get clean, oxygenated blood to places in our body that we didn’t even know we had. Deep, long, slow breathing in concert with yoga movements stretches and rejuvenates the body from the inside to the outside. This type of breathing and moving also helps create space between each vertebra and assists in healing compressed spinal discs; it squeezes tired/trapped blood out of our vital organs and brings fresh oxygenated blood back to those same organs. It also helps break up old scar tissue and fix our posture.
    Why We Slouch on the Couch
    Unfortunately, as we accumulate physical traumas in our lives, such as sports injuries, car accidents, pile drivers/tombstones, falls, or even steel chairs to the skull, an accumulation of scar tissue forms around those old injuries. These traumas create structural “holding patterns” in our body, which cause loss of flexibility as well as distortions in ourposture. Even smaller traumas, such as slouching on the couch, sleeping on airplanes, long periods of inactivity, driving for long hours, or sitting for hours at the computer can create bad postural habits. According to theYoga-Doc, in time, these “postural distortions” and regions of accumulated stress will cause our body to close down and fold inward, which leads to decreased lung capacity—which could cause the depth of our breath to become shallower and shallower. Shallow breathing means less efficient blood-oxygen exchange and could lead to a lot of physical problems.
    How Can Yoga Help?

    You may ask, “Can yoga help change or prevent all of this?” The answer is, YES! Regular yoga workouts can assist in loosening you up and straightening you out!
    The Yoga-Doc taught me a lot about how yoga helps the brain and nervous system. So now I’ll break it all down into a language that I call “Regular Guy-ese.” When we take deep, long, slow breaths, we can actually stop the “fight or flight” portion of our nervous system (called the sympathetic nervous system) from overreacting to different types of stress. The sympathetic nervous system goes into high gear when our brain activates it in the presence of perceived danger. We absolutely need the sympathetic system when we are in physical danger because it prepares our body to either do some serious ass whoopin’ or run like hell if necessary. It is a lot like having a nitrous oxide tank hooked up to your hot rod. You know that you should use it only when you absolutely need it, because if you fire it up too often, it will tear apart the inner workings of your vehicle.
    Unfortunately, our brain fires up our sympathetic