Two Trackman iO simulators are part of a much broader overhaul at Virgin Active Chiswick Riverside, where golf, recovery, racquets, family life and even the working day are being pulled under one roof.

Golf indoors can sometimes feel like an apology for not being outdoors. At Virgin Active Chiswick Riverside, however, the arrival of two Trackman iO simulators is part of something rather more ambitious.

The west London club is being recast as a place where a round on St Andrews can sit in the same day as a swim, a Pilates session, a spell on the padel court, some recovery work and, should real life insist on intruding, a meeting.

That makes the golf addition interesting beyond the technology itself. Virgin Active is not building a golf facility and adding a few treadmills around it. It is attempting to make golf one part of a much broader sporting and social club experience.

For golfers accustomed to choosing between the gym, the range, the swimming pool and somewhere civilised to open a laptop, there is an obvious logic to that.

Two Trackman Simulators, More Than 200 Courses

Chiswick Riverside now has two Trackman iO golf simulators, giving members access to more than 200 virtual courses, including St Andrews and PGA National.

There are no grand claims here about replacing the real thing, nor should there be. Nobody has yet improved the Old Course by putting it indoors.

What the simulators do offer is another way of fitting golf into a club already built around multiple sports and training options. A golfer can practise or play virtually without making golf the sole purpose of the visit.

That matters because Chiswick Riverside is unusually large by London health-club standards. Its existing facilities include 25-metre indoor and outdoor swimming pools, tennis and padel courts, a wide programme of classes and training, and its role as an official HYROX Training Club Partner.

Golf now joins that mix rather than sitting apart from it.

A Health Club Beginning to Behave Like a Country Club

The larger story is Virgin Active’s attempt to move beyond the familiar gym formula.

Chiswick Riverside has the space to make the idea plausible. Sitting beside the Thames, it already has more in common with a multi-sport club than a conventional room full of resistance machines and people pretending not to look at one another.

The latest changes push further in that direction.

A dedicated studio has been created for one-to-one and small-group Pilates. The recovery area has also been expanded, with Hyperice-powered recovery technology and heated hydromassage beds.

Medical and Longevity Wellness Suites, operated with Marylebone Health Group, bring physiotherapy, osteopathy, sports therapy and performance services into the club.

For golfers, that combination is perhaps as relevant as the simulators. Golf rarely exists in isolation from the rest of the body, however enthusiastically some of us may attempt to prove otherwise.

The Club Wants More Than Your Training Hour

Perhaps the clearest sign of the change is the amount of space being devoted to things that do not involve counting repetitions.

Co-working areas have been expanded. There is a new main lounge for members and families, an adults’ lounge with private meeting rooms and an upgraded Kauai café offering table service.

Club V, Virgin Active’s family area, has also been enlarged and redesigned, while junior swimming and racquets programmes are being joined by Junior Padel.

The idea is fairly straightforward: if members are already coming to train, swim or play sport, Virgin Active would quite like them not to disappear immediately afterwards.

Elena Chambers, Country Director at Virgin Active UK, describes the ambition this way: “Our ambition is to build on everything members already love about Chiswick and create a club that becomes part of how they live their whole day – not simply somewhere they come to exercise.”

That is corporate strategy expressed in unusually plain English. The traditional gym sells access to exercise. Chiswick Riverside is increasingly selling access to time spent at the club.

Golf Fits the Bigger Social Wellness Bet

Virgin Active calls the broader strategy Social Wellness.

Its Mayfair club, reopened in July, became the company’s first UK Social Wellness Club. Chiswick Riverside takes the same idea in a different direction: more space, more sport, more family provision and a setting capable of carrying something closer to the country-club model.

Further changes at Chiswick Riverside are planned for 2027.

For golf, the intriguing part is where the game has been placed within that strategy. The Trackman simulators are not being treated as a novelty in the corner or as entertainment detached from training. They sit alongside swimming, Pilates, recovery, racquets and performance services.

That is a useful indication of how golf increasingly fits within the wider fitness and leisure world: less as a separate activity requiring its own day, and more as something that can be folded into one.

The purist may still prefer turf beneath the spikes, wind in the face and a three-footer that suddenly looks six feet long. Quite right too.

But for a London club attempting to occupy more of its members’ day, two hundred virtual courses are a fairly persuasive addition to the itinerary.