HARD TIME
BECAUSE FIT IS THE NEW RICH
TRAIN TO BE FREE
Joe Kwon started CONFIT to help give ex-cons a fresh start after prison. It turns out a bare-bones approach to training and a mindset geared towards self-improvement can help anyone break out of a fitness rut
HEAVY RAIN is forming loungeroom-sized puddles on the grass in front of the grandstand at Callan Park Oval in Sydney’s Lilyfield, as a group of fitness enthusiasts struggles through a gruelling dawn training session led by Joe Kwon, a former inmate turned PT. Still dark, the grandstand is lit by a spotlight, as Kwon instructs the group to hold a one-minute plank followed by a wall sit.
“Funny story in ‘juvey’ the other day,” says Kwon, as our quads begin to scream in private agony. “Kid chucked his guts up doing this workout.” It’s not your typical PT banter but then Kwon is hardly your average fitness instructor.
Founder of the social enterprise CONFIT, an initiative that aims to use fitness to help ex-cons readjust to society after prison, Kwon is dressed head-to-toe in black. Prison tatts catch the eye on the powerfully built 34-year-old’s arms and legs. One in Mandarin on his left biceps was inspired by a Chinese man Kwon befriended inside. It says, “Only the strong survive”. It’s the kind of hackneyed aphorism that can ring a little hollow in civilian life or be rendered meaningless in, say, a CrossFit call-to-arms. In prison, though, they’re words you
