With pools, padel, tennis, TrackMan golf, recovery facilities, proper food and somewhere to open a laptop, Virgin Active Chiswick Riverside is making a persuasive case for the all-day health club.
There are gyms you visit because you need to train, gyms you tolerate because they are convenient, and then there are the very occasional places where you finish your workout and realise you have absolutely no desire to go home.
Virgin Active Chiswick Riverside falls firmly into that last category.
Calling it a gym almost feels like doing it a disservice. After spending time there, I would describe it as something much closer to a modern country club — albeit one built around training, sport, recovery and wellness rather than golf jackets and old-school formality.
In fact, it is probably one of the best health clubs I have had the pleasure of visiting in the UK.
The reason is not simply that it has an impressive gym floor or a long list of facilities. Plenty of premium clubs can make that claim. What makes Chiswick Riverside stand out is how successfully everything has been brought together.
You can arrive to train, play padel, hit tennis balls, swim, practise your golf swing, have lunch, recover, open your laptop and get a couple of hours of work done without ever really needing to leave.
The only thing missing is a bed.
More country club than conventional gym
Virgin Active has been steadily repositioning some of its clubs around what it calls “Social Wellness”, and Chiswick Riverside might be one of the clearest demonstrations yet of what that concept can look like when there is enough space to do it properly.
The traditional gym model is fairly transactional: arrive, train, shower and go home.
Chiswick feels designed to make you stay.
There are 25-metre indoor and outdoor swimming pools, tennis and padel courts, a significant class programme, dedicated training spaces and, as an official HYROX Training Club Partner, plenty for anybody who takes their conditioning seriously.
But the sporting facilities are now only part of the attraction.
The redevelopment has placed much greater emphasis on recovery, health services, Pilates, food, family facilities and co-working. The result is a club that can occupy far more of your day than the hour or so normally reserved for exercise.
And unusually, that does not feel forced.
It feels like the logical evolution of what a premium health club should probably be.
The TrackMan golf simulators are a brilliant addition
For sports lovers, one of my favourite additions is the arrival of two high-tech golf simulators powered by TrackMan.
They sit alongside the club’s existing tennis and padel offering and give golfers access to more than 200 virtual courses through the TrackMan iO system.
For anybody who already plays golf, the appeal is obvious. TrackMan technology gives you detailed data on your shots and makes a simulator session useful for considerably more than simply knocking a few balls around for entertainment.
It means you can work on your swing and ball striking in a controlled environment before heading elsewhere in the club for a gym session, swim or recovery session.
It is another example of why describing Chiswick Riverside simply as a gym starts to feel increasingly inaccurate.
This is becoming a genuine multi-sport club.
Recovery is treated as part of training
One of the biggest changes is the expanded emphasis on recovery.
And this is an area where Chiswick Riverside has clearly understood how much the fitness industry has changed.
For years, recovery was the part you dealt with when you got home. You trained at the gym and then stretched, foam rolled or attempted to repair yourself somewhere else.
Here, recovery has been incorporated into the club itself.
The Recovery Centre features premium recovery technology from Therabody, allowing members to give recovery the same kind of attention they give their training.
That becomes particularly appealing after a heavy gym session, long padel match or demanding conditioning workout.
Rather than immediately heading for the door, you can move from performance into recovery without leaving the building.
There are also expanded health and performance services through Medical and Longevity Wellness Suites operated in partnership with Marylebone Health Group, with services including physiotherapy, osteopathy, sports therapy and performance expertise.
The distinction is important: this does not suddenly make a health club a medical facility.
What it does do is place training, professional support and recovery much closer together, which makes enormous practical sense for members trying to look after their bodies rather than simply exhaust them.
There is also dedicated one-to-one and small-group Pilates, adding another more focused training option to the club.
The food is good enough to become part of the reason you stay
One of the easiest things for premium gyms to get wrong is the food.
A beautiful club can quickly lose some of its appeal if the post-workout options amount to a protein shake, dry chicken and something green in a plastic container.
That is absolutely not the case here.
The food from the in-house Kauai kitchen is genuinely delicious, and the Vietnamese steak wrap I tried is up there with the best I have had.
That might sound like an oddly specific thing to highlight in a gym review, but it matters because food is an important part of what makes the whole Chiswick concept work.
If Virgin Active wants members to stay for several hours rather than disappear after their workout, the café cannot feel like an afterthought.
At Chiswick, it does not.
You can finish training, sit down for proper food and a coffee, and quite easily find yourself wondering why you need to leave at all.
The enhanced Kauai café now includes table service, further reinforcing the impression that this is somewhere to spend time rather than somewhere designed to process people through their workouts as quickly as possible.
You can genuinely work from here
Then there are the workspaces.
This might be one of the smartest parts of the redevelopment because it deals with one of the biggest barriers many people have to spending more time looking after themselves: work.
Co-working facilities have been expanded throughout the club, while there is a new main lounge, an adults’ lounge and private meeting rooms.
For anybody who is particularly work-conscious, that removes one of the classic excuses for cutting a training session short.
Bring the laptop.
You could arrive, get some work done, train during a break, shower, eat lunch and return to a workstation afterwards. Alternatively, finish your session, grab a coffee and clear a few emails before heading home.
For hybrid workers in particular, that is an extremely attractive proposition.
Instead of having a gym competing with your working day, the two can coexist in the same place.
Elena Chambers, Country Director at Virgin Active UK, has described the ambition as creating a club that becomes part of how members live their entire day rather than simply somewhere they visit to exercise.
Having experienced Chiswick Riverside, that statement makes considerably more sense.
This is one of the few clubs I have visited where spending half a day there does not seem remotely unrealistic.
Families have been properly considered too
The redevelopment also acknowledges another reality of staying active: for parents, fitness has to fit around family life.
Club V has been redesigned to give younger members more opportunities to play, learn and stay active, while the club already offers junior swimming and racquets programmes and has now added Junior Padel.
Combined with the family-oriented lounge spaces, it makes Chiswick Riverside considerably more practical for parents who would otherwise be trying to negotiate exercise around childcare and family commitments.
Again, that is where the country-club comparison starts to make sense.
Different members of the family can have genuinely different reasons for being there rather than everybody simply accompanying whoever happens to be training.
One of the most complete health clubs I have visited in the UK
Virgin Active Chiswick Riverside follows the reopening of Virgin Active Mayfair as the company develops its broader Social Wellness concept in the UK.
But Chiswick has an advantage that is difficult to manufacture in central London: space.
And Virgin Active appears determined to use it.
Swimming, tennis, padel, HYROX training, gym facilities, classes, Pilates, TrackMan golf simulators, recovery technology, professional health services, family facilities, proper food, lounges and co-working all now sit within the same club.
Further areas are also due to be transformed in 2027.
There will always be people who want a gym to be nothing more than a room full of good equipment, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Chiswick Riverside is aimed at something altogether different.
It is trying to become a place where training fits into the rest of your life rather than requiring you to temporarily disappear from it.
And based on my visit, it works exceptionally well.
The biggest compliment I can give Virgin Active Chiswick Riverside is that I arrived expecting to review a gym and left thinking I had visited something much closer to a modern sporting country club.
You can train hard, play sport, recover properly, eat extremely well, get some work done and spend several hours there without feeling as though you are simply hanging around a leisure centre after your workout has finished.
There are very few gyms I have visited in the UK where I could genuinely imagine arriving in the morning and still being perfectly happy to be there late in the afternoon.
Virgin Active Chiswick Riverside is one of them.
Add a bedroom, and they might have a problem getting people to leave.
