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Carol Krucoff, E-RYT 500, is a yoga therapist, fitness expert and author. As a Yoga Therapist at Duke Integrative Medicine–part of the Duke University Health System in Durham, North Carolina– she creates individualized yoga practices for people with health challenges. Carol co-directs the Therapeutic Yoga for Seniors teacher training, designed to help yoga instructors work safely and effectively with older adults and teaches yoga at Duke University’s Center for Living.
Her newest book is “Healing Yoga for Neck and Shoulder Pain: Easy, Effective Practices for Releasing Tension & Relieving Pain,” (New Harbinger 2010), and she is creator of the audio home practice CD, “Healing Moves Yoga.” She is co-author, with her cardiologist husband, Mitchell Krucoff, MD, of ”Healing Moves: How to Cure, Relieve and Prevent Common Ailments with Exercise,” now in its third edition.
Carol has practiced yoga for more than 30 years and is grateful to have taken classes and workshops with a broad array of senior teachers from around the U.S. and India. She is a graduate of Esther Myers’ Yoga Teacher Training and Nischala Devi’s Yoga of the Heart Cardiac & Cancer Teacher Training, is a member of the International Association of Yoga Therapists and serves on the Peer Review Board for the International Journal of Yoga Therapy. In addition to her work at Duke, Carol teaches yoga at a senior residential community near her home in Chapel Hill—where her students are all in their 70s and 80s, including her 84-year-old mother. Her passion for sharing the gifts of yoga with older adults began in 2001, when she created and taught a yoga program for seniors enrolled in a Gerontology Rehabilitation program at the Durham, NC, Veterans Administration Medical Center.
As a journalist, Carol served as founding editor of the Health Section of The Washington Post, where she spent 10 years as a reporter and editor. Her syndicated column, Bodyworks, ran in newspapers around the country from 1988 to 2000, and she has been a contributing editor and columnist for Yoga Journal and a contributing editor for Prevention magazine. Now a free-lance health writer, Carol contributes to numerous national publications, and her articles have appeared in a wide array of media including The New York Times, Reader’s Digest, The Los Angeles Times and Glamour.
Carol is certified as a personal trainer by the American Council on Exercise, and spent a decade studying martial arts. As a second-degree black belt in karate and Sensei, she taught martial arts for four years. Carol presents talks and workshops designed to help people of all ages and abilities bring healing movement into their lives and has been an invited speaker for a variety of groups including the American College of Sports Medicine, the SAS Institute and the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine. On the Internet, she has served as fitness expert for numerous sites, including Disney’s Family.com, Natural Journeys and Atkins University. She is a guest lecturer for the University of North Carolina’s Master’s Degree Program in Medical Journalism, where she also serves on the advisory board.
Carol views yoga as a practice of:
• Observing yourself without judgment
• Undoing. . .Learning to recognize tension and release it
• Non-violence and non-competitiveness
• Self-acceptance and self-discovery
Grounded in a profound trust in the body and its wisdom, Carol encourages students to begin where they are, connect body and mind through the breath, practice with a light heart and have fun!
Blog Posts
In response to my students requests for help in establishing a home practice, I have just released a new CD called Healing Moves Yoga. The 72-minute practice is divided into five sections, so you can do just one section, two, three, four or all five, depending on your time.
Seniors age 65 and older represent the fastest-growing sector of the population and, like many Americans, are increasingly drawn to yoga. This presents both an extraordinary opportunity and a serious challenge for yoga instructors who must be both a resource and guardians of safety for this uniquely vulnerable group.
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