‘Like lying in a space-coffin bombarded with intense heat': My visit to a luxury Dubai wellness centre

Telegraph

07-05-2025

Now I know how a Viennetta feels. Left a little too long in the freezer compartment – sorry, Art of Cryo's 'Vaultz V1 Lux' cryotherapy chamber – I have been removed and popped on the table. I look a lot less appealing than in the adverts.
It's partly that I'm wearing only slippers, gloves, ear muffs and flimsy disposable spa pants to protect my, ahem, extremities; it's also because all my body-hair has frosted ice-cream-white, like grass on a February morning.
According to the treatments menu (and the well-muscled, frost-free man on the front), my nine minutes at -110C should have left me all 'boosted endorphins' and 'immune system activated'.
In fact, I'm shivering on the massage table and begging for more of the 'far infra-red' heat therapy I'd had earlier, which was more microwave-meal than frozen dessert. (Or maybe more dilapidated nuclear plant, since I look strangely like Homer Simpson in the goggles they made me wear for this bit.)
This is life at SIRO One Za'abeel, the first in a new global empire of 'fitness + recovery hotels', where rooms come equipped with stretching bars instead of minibars, there's biohacking instead of a buffet restaurant, and boxing classes instead of a beach club.
A second SIRO opens in Montenegro this May, with others upcoming in Tokyo, Riyadh and Mexico's Los Cabos – but this first one opened last year in, of course, Dubai.
The location makes a lot of sense: Dubai is where footballers go to get fat once the season's finished, and fit before it starts again three months later. And since everything makes you sweat here, you might as well make it count.
Much in need of a mid-season – ok, middle-age – fitness reboot myself, I trotted excitedly out of the lift (give me a break, Bellingham; the hotel's on floors 30 to 36 of a shiny new tower block) and into quite the most intrusive hotel check-in I've ever experienced.
After using a medical-grade Body Composition Analyzer machine to measure my 'skeletal muscle mass', 'fat mass percentage' and 'phase angle' (I don't know either, but 5.6 degrees apparently – much floppier than I would have liked), the in-house nutritionist scurried off to create a personalised meal plan based on my 'individual anthropometrics'.
Had I been staying longer, apparently, I could have asked chefs to prepare dishes from it; instead, I brought it home with me as suggested, though I have somehow yet to make myself a bowlful of golden mango turmeric overnight oats for my Monday morning breakfast. I was glad of the excuse to go off-plan, anyway.
SIRO is connected – by the world's longest cantilever, a giant 'bridge' sticking out into the thin desert air with nothing visibly holding it up – to its sister hotel, One&Only One Za'abeel, and 11 excellent restaurants.
SIRO has a futuristic-looking meal vending machine in Reception, but its 'gluten-free penne pomodoro', though no doubt nutritionally balanced, doesn't sound so tempting when you know you could be having, say, BBQ-smoked chicken in 48-hour stock with foie gras, shiitake, fermented chili paste and black truffle, from three-Michelin-starred chef Dabiz Muñoz's StreetXO restaurant next door.
Then again, next-door doesn't have a fitness complex that takes up an entire floor. SIRO's Pilates Studio, Cycle Studio, Yoga Studio, Experience Box and small-city-sized gym wrap around the glass exterior walls of the building so that every sit-up is incentivised with a view across Dubai's sci-fi skyline, shimmering like a mirage in the heat-haze by day, desert-rose peachy-pink by sunrise or dusk.
Excellent instruction from the resident Master Trainers renders even the most medieval-torture-instrument-looking machines benignant.
My trainer, Runet, makes burpees borderline-fun when she pits me in competition with my girlfriend (though I don't enjoy finding the latter is fitter than me in every sense. No gratuity for Runet today).
The sexiest thing here, though, is the room. A gorgeous-to-look-at, calming-to-live-in combination of slightly Scandi light woods and faintly Japanese clean lines, rooms here have floor-to-ceiling windows, serenely shushhh -ing electronic blackout blinds, delectably temperature-controlled beds, futuristic projectors and flat screen TVs pre-loaded with join-along workout and yoga coaching videos – and a cupboard full of what I'm assured is fitness equipment.
The spa – sorry, Recovery Lab – is a little enigmatic too, with its Vibroacoustic, Intravenous and Dry Needling therapies (the latter, I thought, was what I'd been doing to the girlfriend since her win at the gym).
I have a massage (very nice) followed by a 'Triple Detox by MLX i 3 Dome' (very strange – like lying in a tubular white space-coffin while being bombarded with funny lights and intense 'far infra-red' (FIR) heat.
Then it's the cryotherapy, which really does feel exactly like standing in a freezer. I emerge so bone-deep cold that it takes me five hours to get properly warm afterwards, though that's probably my own fault for trying to 'beat' the two or three minutes most people spend inside.
I'm not sure I feel much better for it, but I certainly check out of SIRO feeling infinitely healthier than every other time I've visited Dubai and sampled its bottomless-brunch menus. That's worth a little light frostbite, no?
Essentials
Ed Grenby was a guest of SIRO One Za'abeel (00 971 4 666 1717), which offers doubles from £200 per night including breakfast, and British Airways, which has return flights from Heathrow from £496 per person.