Inside the Studio Where Lourdes Leon Trains Three Times a Week

Before celebrity trainer Carlos Leon discusses The Olean House—the New York City fitness and wellness studio he just opened with longtime friend and yoga instructor Menna Olvera—there’s another establishment he’d like to acknowledge. 

“I’m going to give a shout out to Crunch,” he says, sitting next to Olvera in their Chelsea, Manhattan studio. “I started at Crunch as a front desk person, back in the day when it was on Charles Street [in the West Village]. I was like, ‘Wait a minute—I love this fitness stuff, I love to work out.’ So I got certified and that’s how I started my career, in ‘94.” Over the next three years, New York-native Leon became bicoastal as he established himself as a personal trainer, and had daughter Lourdes with his then-girlfriend Madonna. When he met Olvera in 1997 while they were both working at Crunch on Sunset Boulevard, the two immediately hit it off. 

They’ve been friends ever since, with Leon pursuing fitness and acting, and Olvera studying yoga and functional medicine, eventually becoming director of the Donna Karan co-founded Urban Zen Integrative Therapy program. “We always knew we were going to open up a place together,” Olvera says—an ambition partly inspired by the myriad of health issues they’d observed among family, type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure among them. In 2018 when an otherwise healthy Leon was diagnosed with prostatitis, he turned to Olvera for help integrating more yoga and meditation into his training sessions. “What we were doing with yoga began to complement what he was doing with [HIIT and weight training] and we just started to merge everything,” Olvera explains. That melding not only helped to lower Leon’s stress levels and alleviate prostatitis symptoms like pelvic pain, it also became the foundation of The Olean House. The moniker is a blend of Leon and Olvera’s last names.