Why Hot Yoga?
- Heat thins the blood which increases the heart rate, making hot yoga an excellent low-impact cardiovascular workout.
- Heat increases blood flow, allowing more blood and oxygen to be delivered to the muscles, joints and the lymphatic and endocrine systems.
- Heat speeds the breakdown of glucose and fatty acids.
- Heat makes the muscles more elastic and pliable which allows for deeper, safer stretching.
- Heat helps you sweat allowing the body to detoxify and flush toxins.
- Heat enhances blood flow, bringing natural healing and balance back into your body.
We believe that the healing of the mind is the greatest benefit of yoga. The positive impact yoga has on one’s body and health is a bonus.
Yoga is for Everyone
We want to welcome you to Sumits Hot Yoga Springfield, a place that has become more than just a yoga studio, but more of a yoga community and a home away from home for so many people. We are proud to have been a part of Springfield’s first hot yoga studio since the doors opened in 2009, and we look forward to many more years of sharing yoga with the Springfield community.
We met in 2001 as teammates on the cheerleading team at Missouri State University, and over the past decade it has become our passion to not only share health and wellness, but to inspire others to allow these things to become a lifestyle. When we were introduced to Sumit and his practice, he gave us many of the tools that we needed to do just that. Sumits Yoga encompasses everything that we love in an 80 minute practice.
Anyone from any walk of life is welcome at our studio. Yoga is for everyone. We have been so blessed to watch many lives change through a simple yoga practice, and can’t wait for you to begin your journey. Our doors are always open, all we need is you!
Sumit Banerjee
Sumits Yoga was created by Sumit Banerjee based on his own years of experience teaching and practicing various yoga styles including Bikram and vinyasa. His sequence and style of teaching reinforce his primary objective as a teacher: helping others to realize the powerful wellness benefits of yoga including a stronger, toned and more flexible body, and an improved state of mind encouraging relaxation, self-acceptance and awareness.
Classes at Sumits Yoga flow to music through a sequence of both balancing and energizing asanas (poses) in a heated practice environment. Through his Bikram practice, Sumits understands the healing aspect of the heat. It’s simple, he says. In a yoga class, you practice poses that require stretching and compression of the joints, muscles, ligaments and other supporting structures of the body. Your body naturally protects itself from physical exertion by generating heat from the inside muscles outwards. We start with the heat upfront providing that extra protection from the very first poses. Another added benefit is that your body burns fat more effectively. It is not uncommon for our students practicing regularly to lose inches of shape in a relatively short amount of time.
Though his classes are designed to optimize physical health by waking and energizing the entire body, Sumit stresses that the greatest benefit comes not as much from the healing of the body, but from the healing of the mind. The simple pleasure and self-reward that comes from quieting our minds, listening to each breath and honoring where our bodies are in stillness or movement cannot be measured. You do not measure your yoga practice on how many perfectly aligned poses you can perform, he asserts, but by how deeply you can immerse yourself inward. It’s amazing how a simple downward dog can be felt so differently by a student on any given day and still provide a feeling of connection, balance and satisfaction regardless of the depth it is practiced. This is the beauty of yoga and it awaits every student who is ready to let go of the ego and begin listening to our own deeper wisdom.
Sumit encourages all students, newcomers and experience students alike, to begin practicing and maintaining a consistent practice regardless of the style preferred. You’ll benefit from class regardless of how far or deep you get. As long as you are feeling it and you are breathing calmly, you’re practicing correctly.