The Life Time club in Downtown Palm Beach Gardens has outgrown its own four floors. This week the club opened a separate 20,500-square-foot building with six pickleball courts across the road from the main club, plus a new 24-reformer studio inside, and it is enlarging its third-floor gym by more than 5,600 square feet for a reopening later this fall. Life Time announced the expansion on October 8, and both the courts and the studio are already in use.

A building just for pickleball

The headline piece is the court building. Rather than carve courts out of existing space, Life Time put up a dedicated structure across the street from the club at 11825 Lake Victoria Gardens Avenue. It holds six courts, and the company has laid it out for the full run of how people actually play: leagues, tournaments, social events and drop-in open play.

It is also built for the part of pickleball that happens off the court. There is a lounge for the wait between games and the conversation after them, a wall of paddles, shoes and athletic clothes for sale, and a grab-and-go cooler stocked with drinks and healthy snacks. Anyone who has stood in the sun waiting for a court at a public park knows why that matters.

The club runs a full ladder of pickleball programs, from beginner instruction to lessons, mixers, leagues and junior play. Members with the club's Signature membership can reserve courts at no added cost through the Life Time app, open play is available to all members, and lessons, mixers and leagues carry a separate fee. Kids need a junior membership to join the youth programs.

A reformer studio with 45 classes a week

Inside the main club, Life Time has opened a studio for CTR, short for Core Tone Reform, its own reformer class. It blends the controlled movements people know from Pilates with harder athletic conditioning, and the room is set up with 24 reformers. The club has already put 45 CTR classes a week on the schedule, which works out to more than six a day.

Reformer classes have become one of the most crowded corners of the fitness business in Palm Beach County, with boutique studios opening in plazas from Jupiter to Boca Raton. Folding a large reformer room into a club membership changes the math for anyone currently paying per class somewhere else.

More room for weights, later this fall

The third piece is not open yet. The club's third-floor exercise area is growing by more than 5,600 square feet, which will bring the total strength and cardio space to 31,000 square feet. Life Time has said only that it expects to finish later this fall and has not given a date.

For regulars, that is the part of the expansion that may matter most day to day. Strength floors fill up at the same predictable hours everywhere, before work and right after it, and extra square footage is the one fix for a wait at the squat rack.

Why the club is growing now

Life Time opened in Palm Beach Gardens in August 2022 as one of the anchors of Downtown Palm Beach Gardens, the 403,000-square-foot open-air center owned by EDENS. The main building already runs to about 136,000 square feet across four floors, with a rooftop beach club and a Life Time Work coworking lounge.

In its announcement, the company said demand for pickleball, group classes and strength training at the club has kept climbing since it opened, and the expansion is aimed at all three at once. Susan Mistri, who leads the club, said the additions answer what members have been asking for.

It also fits a pattern. Pickleball has spread across north Palm Beach County faster than courts could be built, and the newest wave of private clubs has been chasing exactly the player who wants a guaranteed court, shade and a place to sit afterward. A six-court building attached to an existing gym is one of the quicker ways to meet that demand.

What it means if you live nearby

The club is open from 4 a.m. to midnight on weekdays and 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. on weekends, and its phone number is 561-352-2705. Members can book the new courts and CTR classes in the Life Time app now. Anyone thinking about joining can tour the club and the new court building before deciding.

For Palm Beach Gardens, the expansion adds six courts, a 24-reformer studio and, by the end of the year, a noticeably larger gym floor, all within walking distance of the restaurants and shops at Downtown. For the many residents who already treat Downtown as a second living room, there is now one more reason to park there.