Exploring Life & Business with Yonatan Elkayam of West Hollywood Pilates

Today we’d like to introduce you to Yonatan Elkayam.

Hi Yonatan, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
For most of my adult life, I was a full-time artist — a musician, filmmaker, and actor. I loved the creative work, especially performing, but I was always searching for something that could sustain me during the day while I played shows at night. I’d always been drawn to health and wellness, different modalities, different ways of moving the body. I just hadn’t found the right one yet.
Then I met my now wife and business partner Jaime. She was a manager at Equinox and genuinely loved what she was doing. Around that same time, my aunt, who had trained in Equinox’s comprehensive Pilates program, had been quietly trying to convince me to check it out. I had tried Pilates before, but what I’d experienced were those big, loud, modern Mega Reformer classes. Packed rooms, instructors with Britney Spears microphones, music blasting. It felt chaotic. I never felt safe, never felt connected. I’d leave thinking, I should love this. Why don’t I?
Classical Pilates was completely different. The moment I found it, something settled in my body. I fell in love with the history, the fact that Joe Pilates developed this system for boxers, fighters, and acrobats. That it had been around for over 100 years. That it was a practice, not just a workout. It felt right in a way I couldn’t fully explain, so I took the plunge and committed to learning it. With so much passion driving me, I was quickly becoming a star in my program.
Then the pandemic hit.
Luckily I was able to finish the program online and get my certification. Jaime and I suddenly had a lot of time and space to ask bigger questions about our lives, our purpose, what we actually wanted to build together. We started studying Reiki, and that opened everything up. We began working with couples in our community who were stuck and needed real transformation, and out of that grew a program that addressed the whole person: the body through Classical Pilates and functional movement, the mind through coaching, and the spirit through breathwork, Reiki, energy healing, and sound healing. We called the company Word of Mouth, found at http://wordofmouth.love/.
As we started sharing what we’d built, we realized that trying to explain the full scope of it in a single breath was a lot to ask of people. So we made a decision to separate it into two distinct businesses. West Hollywood Pilates serves the body and mind through private, one-on-one Classical Pilates sessions. Word of Mouth serves the mind and spirit through coaching, Reiki, and sound healing. Two doors into the same philosophy, meeting people wherever they are.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Like anything worthwhile, it hasn’t always been smooth. Our biggest early challenge was trying to explain the full picture of what we do in a single breath. People didn’t always know what to make of us. Was it movement? Was it coaching? Was it energy work? The answer was all three, and that was precisely the point — but it wasn’t always an easy sell.
What we knew from experience was that the combination worked. Getting someone to move for twenty minutes before dropping into a coaching session changed everything. The small talk fell away, people went deeper, and we could get to the core of things so much faster. And then Reiki would carry us into the places that words simply couldn’t reach. We had seen the transformation firsthand. Getting other people to understand it before they’d felt it for themselves — that was the harder part.
The turning point came when we made the decision to give the Pilates work its own identity as West Hollywood Pilates. Once we did that, things started to fall into place. People could find us, understand us, and trust us. And then, in the room, the work would speak for itself.

Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
West Hollywood Pilates is a private, one-on-one Classical Pilates and functional movement studio located at Highland and Melrose. Every session is tailored to the individual, their body, their history, their goals, and delivered at the highest level of instruction Classical Pilates has to offer.
The studio itself is a full classical setup with top-of-the-line Contrology equipment by Balanced Body: a Reformer Tower Combo, a Cadillac, a Ladder Barrel, a Wunda Chair, a Ped-o-Pull, Spine Correctors, and more. Walking in, people often just stop and take it in. The space is beautiful, expansive, and genuinely calming, designed to make you feel safe enough to work hard.
What sets us apart is the integrity of the experience from start to finish. Some studios around Los Angeles offer private sessions, but in practice, there’s often another session happening in the same room at the same time. That’s not privacy, that’s proximity. At West Hollywood Pilates, when it’s your session, the space is yours entirely. Your needs are the only needs in the room.
Each session opens with breathwork and closes with a short meditation. It isn’t an afterthought, it’s intentional. We’ve found that bringing the breath in at the beginning settles the nervous system and makes the body more receptive, and ending with stillness means people leave not just stronger, but clearer. Clients regularly tell us they’ve never experienced anything quite like it.
What we’re most proud of is that people come to us and don’t want to go anywhere else. That kind of loyalty isn’t something you market your way into. It comes from people feeling genuinely seen, genuinely challenged, and genuinely cared for, every single session.

If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
Growing up, I had a complicated relationship with sports and exercise. I was always drawn to movement, but my body had a way of making it difficult. At six-foot-five, I required more care than most, and I didn’t always know that yet.
I played basketball and genuinely loved the team aspect of it, but my competitive nature had a way of getting the better of me. Rolled ankles, knee injuries — my body kept sending me messages I wasn’t quite ready to hear. And every time movement let me down, I turned to music. It was my escape, the place I could pour my heartache into, the one thing that never injured me. I was a musician, a filmmaker, an actor – deeply creative, deeply expressive. But for a long time, I couldn’t find a way to make movement and music feel like the same language.
I moved on to swimming, which I loved, and eventually found CrossFit and weightlifting. CrossFit was exhilarating. The competitive energy suited me. But the culture prioritized intensity over form and technique, and eventually I paid for it with torn rotator cuffs and a serious lower back injury.
There was a pattern I couldn’t ignore. I kept finding movement I loved, and then losing it to injury.
When I discovered Classical Pilates, something shifted. Not only did it feel sustainable, something I could genuinely see myself doing for the rest of my life, but it began to heal the damage I’d accumulated along the way. My ankles are stronger than they’ve ever been. My shoulders have fully recovered. My back feels incredible. And perhaps most meaningfully, my only competition now is myself. That turns out to be the best competitor I could ask for.
But the thing that surprised me most was this: Classical Pilates finally gave me a place where movement and music belong to the same world. The practice itself has the structure and precision of classical music, every exercise performed with proper form, proper alignment, proper technique, nothing arbitrary, nothing wasted. And then within that structure lives something that feels more like jazz. Every day your body shows up a little differently, and there’s an element of improvisation, a need to listen and respond. When I’m teaching, I feel like a conductor, and the body in front of me is the orchestra. There’s a poetry of motion in it that I never expected to find.
If I could go back and give my younger self one piece of advice, it would be to find Classical Pilates sooner. Not just to protect the body, but because it turned out to be the place where all of it finally came together.

Pricing:

• An Intro Session is $65

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.westhollywoodpilates.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/westhollywoodpilates
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/westhollywoodpilates
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@WestHollywoodPilates
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/west-hollywood-pilates-los-angeles?utm_campaign=www_business_share_popup&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_source=(direct)