About

About W1 Performance

We believe health is not a destination. It is the foundation everything else is built on.

Leigh Clayton, founder of W1 Performance and performance coach in Marylebone, London

A craft, not a volume business

W1 Performance was founded on a simple but powerful idea: the people who perform best in life are not the ones who push hardest, but the ones who understand themselves most deeply. Their bodies. Their minds. Their limits, and what lies beyond them.

Based in Marylebone, London, we work with a small number of clients at any one time. Not because we have to, but because we choose to. This is not a volume business. It is a craft.

Leigh Clayton in Marylebone

Founder story

After sixteen years in this industry I had watched hundreds of people change their bodies remarkably and walk away with deeper problems than they arrived with. The results were real. The physiques changed. But the methods were one-dimensional: extreme, unsustainable, and built around a single gear of hard and harder. Clients got into extraordinary shape and accumulated injuries, developed difficult relationships with food and exercise, and could not hold any of it the moment life got in the way. The physical change was genuine. Everything underneath it was untouched.

I was living it myself. Training the way the industry demanded, I reached a point where the approach that was supposed to make me better was making me worse: more injuries, more frustration, and a growing disconnection from the thing I had built my career around.

So I built W1 Performance, not as another body-composition business but as the thing the industry was missing. A methodology built around living well, which recognises that being in shape is part of the picture rather than the whole of it, and that the person in front of you has a life, a context, hobbies, pressures, and a very specific idea of what feeling good actually means for them.

W1 Performance exists because I got frustrated enough to do it differently. Because hard for the sake of hard is not a methodology. And because the people who need this most are not looking for someone to flog them: they are looking for someone who understands them, builds around them, and helps them find out what they are actually capable of. On their own terms, for the rest of their life.

Today, my role at W1 Performance is director and lead performance coach: building the right specialist network around each client, overseeing the quality of every programme, and making sure the standard of care never wavers.

The approach

Performance is personal. So is how we work.

Every client starts in the same place: a Vitality Profile, a deep, honest assessment across the eight elements of health and performance.

  • Purpose & Identity
  • Strength & Fitness
  • Body Composition
  • Movement & Biomechanics
  • General Health
  • Nutrition
  • Sleep & Recovery
  • Focus & Energy
“We don’t fit people into programmes. We build every programme around the person.”

From there, we bring together exactly the right combination of coaching, specialist care and clinical insight. Sometimes that means working closely with a physiotherapist or psychologist. Sometimes it means working alongside Cedars Sinai physicians to get a complete clinical picture through advanced diagnostics and biomarker analysis. Always, it means treating the whole person, not a set of symptoms or a set of goals.

Credentials and experience

Leigh holds a BSc in Sport and Exercise Science and has spent sixteen years in personal performance coaching, working with executives, professionals and high-performing individuals in London. He is currently completing the Hintsa Performance Coaching Course, and is an OPEX Certified Coach and a Resistance Training Specialist, qualified in Functional Movement Systems screening and Level 5 BTEC Soft Tissue Therapy. He holds an advanced Oxygen Advantage breathwork certification and has formal training in psychotherapy and counselling, alongside two years facilitating men’s groups and applied somatic work. He was Education Coordinator at Third Space, responsible for developing and delivering personal training products and education programmes.

The combination is the point rather than the list: academic grounding, elite sport experience, clinical-level knowledge of the body, and psychological training, applied to one person at a time. To be clear about the boundary, the psychotherapy and counselling training informs how Leigh coaches; it is not offered as therapy, and he is not a clinician.

Training and memberships

  • BSc Sport and Exercise Science
  • 16 years in personal performance coaching
  • Hintsa Performance Coaching Course (in progress)
  • OPEX Certified Coach (CCP)
  • MBSC (Movement and Strength Coach)
  • Resistance Training Specialist (RTS)
  • Functional Movement Systems (FMS)
  • Level 5 BTEC Soft Tissue Therapy
  • Level 3 Personal Training and Education
  • O2 Advantage Breathwork Certified
  • Breathwork Practitioner
  • Psychotherapy and Counselling
  • Group Facilitation
  • Tennis Equipment Specialist and Stringer

As featured in

Leigh's work has been featured in Men's Health, Women's Health, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan and The Telegraph, writing and commenting on training, recovery and long-term health for a professional readership. Being asked for comment by editors is not the same as being a coach, but it is a reasonable signal of whether someone's thinking stands up outside their own website.

Leigh Clayton presenting to a group

Specialist network and clinical partners

The third differentiator Leigh names is clinical integration: working alongside physicians so that medical oversight informs lifestyle coaching rather than running separately from it. In practice that means an advanced blood panel, a DEXA scan, biomarker analysis and a physician consultation can be coordinated as part of your programme, working with physicians from Cedars Sinai and The Mayfair GP. It also means that where you already have a GP, a physiotherapist or a consultant, they are brought into the picture rather than worked around. Coordination is the product here. Most clients at this level are not short of practitioners: what they lack is one person who knows the whole picture and is accountable for the outcome.

Leigh Clayton coaching a client

How the practice works

W1 Performance operates as a private, one-to-one performance practice. Every programme is delivered through an ongoing relationship, so strategy evolves as your life, workload and priorities change. Coaching cycles typically run two to three years and many clients have stayed considerably longer, which is possible only because the work goes beyond surface-level results. Leigh takes on a small number of clients, choosing depth over volume, and works internationally with founders, chief executives, investors, creatives and athletes. Sessions run at UNTIL Marylebone on Orchard Street and at Common Purpose in Mayfair, both private, high-spec spaces rather than commercial gyms, and remote coaching is available wherever you are.

Leigh Clayton coaching a dumbbell lunge

Where Leigh has worked

Sixteen years across the strongest names in London coaching, before founding W1 Performance in Marylebone. Ultimate Performance London and Matt Roberts Personal Training. Platinum Trainer at David Lloyd, Elite Trainer at Virgin Active, and Elite Trainer and Education Coordinator at Third Space London, where he trained other coaches as well as clients. Professional football before that.

Leigh Clayton running with a client

Who this is for

Most clients are between their late thirties and their sixties, in demanding roles, and arrive after something shifted: a health flag, a milestone birthday, or the slow accumulation of feeling less sharp and less like themselves. They have usually tried things that did not hold. They are coachable, in it for the long game, and willing to communicate honestly, because none of this works without that. They are not looking for shortcuts. What they want, in the end, is straightforward: results they can see, health they can measure, and a framework that makes both last.

Why W1 Performance

There are a lot of personal trainers in London. We are not that.

W1 Performance exists for people who have tried the gym memberships, the wellness apps and the nutritionists, and know that what they actually need is something more integrated, more intelligent and more personal.

We exist for the person who is serious about their health, not as a hobby, but as the most important investment they will ever make in their work, their relationships and their quality of life.

If that is you, we would like to talk.

Ready to begin?
Start with your Vitality Profile.

W1 Performance • UNTIL, 1 Orchard Street, London W1H 6HJ

Book your Vitality Profile

Appointments typically available within 1 week