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

know he
thought
he knew how to breathe—but he didn’t. Most people don’t, aside from Olympic swimmers and opera singers. I now know how to breathe properly, but it took me three months before I didn’t have to think about it anymore. Once my breathing became automatic, my flexibility improved by leaps and bounds.
    If you watch a baby breathe, you will see his or her stomach expand with each inhalation and contract with each exhalation. We all breathe properly when we are born, but before you know it, stress creeps into our lives and changes everything. So, here’s the KISS breathing technique:
    1. Sit in a comfortable position on a chair or on the floor, lie on your back, or just stand in an upright position.
    2. Inhale through your nose gently and deeply. Slowly fill your lungs, then your stomach, full of air. That’s right: your stomach, your belly, and your gut push out like Santa Claus as you pull all that air deeply into your lungs and then your stomach. Yes, I said your stomach!
    3. Once you have filled your stomach full of air, slowly exhale through your nose, controlling that exhalation until every last bit of CO 2 leaves you. As you do this, pull your stomach in toward your rib cage; that’s right, bucko—suck in your stomach as you are pushing out the air.
    4. Now inhale once again. Repeat the cycle five more times, and feel the buzz!
    I know it’s not going to feel natural for you to be breathing through your stomach, but you have to trust me. It will continually help you get deeper into each of your positions day by day. Repeat this exercise daily and you will own it.

YA GOTTA HAVEHEART
    Okay guys, it’s time to get your heart on! Yes, yoga can help you get a healthier heart without punishing your knees in the process. You’ll actually be
strengthening
your knees and maximizing your aerobic heart rate by wearing a heart monitor.
    The Formula to Success: Get Your Heart On

    Let me tell you why I wear a heart monitor. The main man responsible for keeping DDP in the ring all of these years is a guy named Dr. Ken West, an applied kinesiologist. One day, Doc West was working on me—the usual two-hour session. And he was telling me about Mark Allen: Mark had won the Hawaii Triathlon three years in a row, but his streak came to an end when he turned thirty-five. He was going to retire, when he heard about the heart monitor work that his kinesiologist, Dr. Phil Maffetone, had been working on.
    Dr. Maffetone believes you can get the most out of your body by controlling your heart rate using a basic formula: Let’s say you’re forty years old. Subtract 40 from 180, which gives you 140. If you keep your heart rate between 120 and 140 beats per minute (bpms), you will burn fat and increase your stamina. Now if you’re an athlete, you can take that 140 up to 145 bpms, and if you are an
extreme
athlete, push it up to 150 bpms, but not for long periods of time. (Like a hot rod, you don’t want to bury the needle in the red zone for long, or something’s gonna blow.)
    The bottom line is that Mark followed these instructions, and the next thing you know, he wins the Ironman again when he’s thirty-six, thirty-seven, and thirty-eight years old before deciding to retire. That’s pretty amazing, considering that the Hawaii Ironman is the mack daddy of all triathlons. They run twenty-six miles, swim five miles, then get on a bike and ride 150 miles—good Gawd!
    I wanted to incorporate that formula into my workout, so I started wearing my heart monitor on the StairMaster and in the gym while I was lifting weights. One day I even wore it to a power yoga class. I wasn’t really paying attention to the monitor while I was working out. But about two-thirds of the way through the class, I glanced at my monitor, and I was amazed that my heart rate was at 152 bpms. I was doing Warrior Two; I thought to myself, wow, this is a great angle to prove to the Regular Guy that this stuff works. (The whole yoga-babes angle came much later.)
    I love having my heart monitor on because it helps me push myself, and it also lets me know when to back off. In this section, we’re going to talk about the importance of maintaining your maximum aerobic heart rate while exercising. We’re going to startby learning the difference between glycogen-burning anaerobic exercise and continuous fat- burning/cardiovascular exercise.
    Put very simply, when you are walking, running, biking, cross-country skiing, doing yoga, or having sex