Diamond Dallas Page (DDP) is a
world champion professional wrestler who has also appeared in some TV shows and
movies. His main message, as stated on the
back cover, is that yoga is not just for women and scrawny new-age girly
men. He explains that yoga is an
excellent workout that will enhance flexibility, and will also provide men a
great way to meet attractive and fit women. 
He provides his own approach, which he calls Yoga for Regular Guys
(YRG). There’s a one page introduction
by heavy metal rock star Rob
Zombie, saying that once he overcame his initial skepticism, he tried YRG and
found that it works. Most of the book consists of
instructions for different workouts of 20 minutes, 30 minutes, and 45
minutes. There are sections at the end
for working on particular parts of the body, such as the back or the hips, on
maintaining health, and eating well — he recommends organic juicing! 

The yoga workouts are from
introductory to intermediate levels. 
They use sun salutations and standing workouts, but no shoulder stands
or other inversions. The workouts are
illustrated with a different person in each pose, with the poses numbered. On a double page, there are 8 poses, and the poses go from
left to right along the top row on both pages, and then along the bottom row on
both pages. There’s a short instruction
along with each photograph. The people
doing the poses are both men and women, and they wear all sorts of different
clothes, from a skimpy top and tight underwear worn by
Gypsy, a professional dancer, to a loose t-shirt and green pants work by Marlon
Ransom, a trainer. The pictures are
quite small, and there’s not a great deal of information given with them, so it
might be hard to get the postures exactly right: working out the best position
for the feet, for example, can be confusing. On the other hand, you do get to see different people doing the same
poses, and you get to see the same poses from different angles, so you can get
a fair amount of detail from the pictures. 

The biggest difficulty in using any
book for a yoga workout is that it is not always convenient turning the pages
to see what comes next. For example, if
you are doing the three-legged dog, which is a form of downward dog with one
leg extended high behind you, it isn’t so easy to lift a hand up to turn the
page to see that next you have to move to a runner’s lunge.  After going through the practices a few
times, the transitions will be familiar, and you can go through the postures
until there comes a convenient point to turn the page.  A problem with this particular book is the
way it specifies the 30-minute and 45-minute workouts.  The 20-minute workout consists of 11
sections, with names like "Touchdowns and Side Bends," and
"Raining Cats, Dogs, and Cobras." 
The 30-minute workout adds one new section and replaces another, but to
follow it, you have to go back to the 20-minute workout, the switch forward to
the added sections, and then switch back to the original 20-minute
workout. There’s
similar problems with the setting out of the 45-minute workout.  This makes it much more difficult to smoothly
do the workout. Even in the "at a
glance" pages at the end, which set out the different workouts, the whole
30- and 45-minutes workouts are not shown as a whole, but just as add-ons to
the 20-minute workouts. This is a
serious flaw for a book that is meant to make yoga more approachable to regular
guys — they are not going to want to be flipping pages backward and forwards
in the middle of a sweaty workout.

The basic idea of YRG is good: it’s
true that most men are rather wary about yoga, and most yoga classes have far
more women than men. Most yoga DVDs seem
to be aimed more at women than men. Now
yoga is clearly becoming more popular and accepted, and men are starting to see
the advantages it brings.Yoga for Regular Guys may help open some
men’s minds to ways to heal the mind and body together.  However, it is far easier to follow a yoga
DVD than it is to follow a book, especially when it comes to coordinating the
breathing in and out with the movements, and sophisticated DVDs like Shiva
Rea’s Yoga Shakti give much more flexibility in creating
workouts that books do. (Shiva Rea is
also far more attractive than DDP and most of his friends.)  Probably some people will be put off by the
Eastern-flavored music and foreign names for postures that someone like Rea
uses, so it’s worth noting that now DDP is selling his own yoga DVDs through
his website and he recommends the Brian
Kest PowerYoga DVDs. It might be worth
using the book along with a DVD so a beginner can get used to the idea of a yoga
flow and take a good look at the different poses in the book, and then follow
along to flows in real time.