Why don’t more guys do yoga? Pro wrestler Diamond Dallas Page and author of Yoga for Regular Guys, thinks he knows.

As a self-professed guy, he thought, “It’s for sissies, right?”

Then a spinal injury put him face to face with the end of his career and the masculine identity accompanying it.

What saved him and his manly image? Yoga. As he says in his DVD Yoga for Regular Guys: “Flexibility is youth, in the body and the mind.

My mind had to become flexible to the idea of doing yoga.” He did, and credits yoga with helping him return to the ring and win the heavyweight title three times in a row.

His workout consists of a 20-minute warm-up routine designed to break a sweat and get the regular guy on the path of doing some exercise.

Very much modeled after a shortened version of a beginners level “power yoga” class, Page presents the workout, leading a group of regular looking guys and supermodel-type women.

The routine is based on standard hatha practices of sun salutes and standing poses, and ends in a traditional final resting pose.

There is minimal weight bearing and the workout takes it easy on flowing transitions between poses so as to remain accessible to people of any level of fitness.

A key distinction of the Diamond Dallas Page way of yoga is that practice is done with a heart monitor strapped around the wrist.

The goal is to hold muscles in poses long enough to increase the heart rate and achieve a cardiovascular workout. The monitor is used to measure when optimum heart rate is reached.

If this is too scientific an approach to exercise for a regular guy, then a balancing counterpoint is the use of halftime-friendly stage names to announce poses and yogic techniques (Urdhva Hastasana is called Touchdown pose, a variation of Malasana is called Catcher pose and Ujjayi is called Santa Claus breathing).

One might even dare to notice the subtle message of a pro wrestler turned yoga instructor discussing concepts of gaining mental stillness and overcoming suffering: that as yoga continues to evolve in the modern world, at its heart it’s still yoga, whether it’s dressed up for the new-age crowd, or for the regular guy. [source: Yogi Times]