It’s 9.30 AM in the studio and traffic outside is buzzing, and it’s getting real hot in here. Yes, we have been experiencing an unusual heatwave, but I’m also referring to the back-to-back scenes unfolding before me: first, Marc Le striking his first pose, the glute bridge, followed by the side leg lift with his muscles flexed and his expression hardened; then Marcus Tan mimicking the HYROX sled pull, with thick ropes encircling his bare shoulders; and lastly Ivan Fredric does the fire hydrant, squeezing his glute muscles together as he holds his position.
As June (famously known as Men’s Health Month) trickles to its end, we bring together three figures in fitness — specifically HYROX, the latest fitness craze — for our cover shoot: Marc, pro rugby player turned HYROX athlete; Marcus, one of the minds behind Afterburn Training Club; and Ivan, who’d done a drastic 180º shift from lawyer to fitness entrepreneur. The thread that connects these three men, besides having their own ‘fitness business’, is a deep desire to foster a sense of community.
“I’m very passionate about helping people, and not only through physical health,” Marc tells me, the lilt of his Kiwi accent strong. “There’s something special about when someone changes physically. There’s a mental shift as well. And then when that mental shift happens, it’s really quite special to see. Because it changes their whole lifestyle. That’s what I think is really, really cool to see.”
Marc has long been considered the first professional rugby player in Malaysia, and his decade-long sports career was expansive. He’d represented the country back in the 2014 Commonwealth Games, and even played in big leagues internationally. “I think there were definitely people before me that had definitely ‘pioneered’ rugby,” he says, “but being one of the first to play in Japan as a Malaysian was a privilege. And also, I guess, it led the way or exposed a lot of other aspiring rugby players in Malaysia, showed that there is an end goal or there are opportunities outside of Malaysia.”
Marc was born in KL but he moved to New Zealand, the national land of rugby, when he was three. “As soon as I could run around, my had me on the rugby field,” he shares. “I was five years old. And so, I was running around since five, that’s how I got into fitness, I guess. My dad exposed me to a lot of different sports as well; basketball, baseball. But I mean, at the end of the day, rugby was my chosen sport. I’d enjoyed athletics as well, so I would do athletics in the summer and then rugby in the winter.”
Now approaching forty, Marc has translated his love for rugby and fitness into helping others. “I think my first professional contract was always a huge highlight, playing alongside some amazing, famous ex-rugby players that I never imagined even sharing the field with,” he muses. “Representing Malaysia at the Commonwealth Games was fantastic, it’s always an honour to represent your country. So, what’s next? Well, I’ve opened a couple of gyms. I currently own the biggest HYROX simulator facility in all of Southeast Asia. And with HYROX coming into Kuala Lumpur, it’s going to be a very busy period for fitness gyms in KL. And I think it’s great, because more people moving is always my philosophy. Malaysia has a 53% obesity rate, so getting more people moving is always the goal. No matter if it’s HYROX, Crossfit, Pilates, yoga, spin, strength training… it’s all a vehicle for them to get to their goals, and do something new.”
The Backyard Training specialises in HYROX simulation, and is the second business journey Marc has undergone — so when he’d started it, he’d already had a bit of experience. There was much more space than he’d known what to do with, so designing the gym had been a challenge; budget constraints also proved difficult; and finding a good team to kick-start the business with was also a feat. “If you have the right people around you, you can always go far,” Marc expresses. “It’s very hard to do it all alone. As an entrepreneur, you wear many different hats. You’re the marketing person, you’re the HR person, you’re the coach, you’re the owner, you’re the finance person. It can be quite exhausting. So, you need a team, you need to be able to delegate, you need to be able to trust them and all be aligned towards the same goal. That’s a huge challenge. Finding trustworthy people is always hard.”
That said, Marc runs The Backyard Training with his wife, Siu Lim — who’s a well-known KL-based Pilates instructor, and avid content creator alongside Marc. “She’s someone that’s automatically trustworthy, like I just said, but also knows me in and out,” Marc affirms. “So, she probably knows my strengths and weaknesses better than myself. Therefore, she’s able to help me delegate and push me towards my strengths, and take some of the other stuff off my plate. At the end of the day, strength and conditioning is the overall philosophy. Giving people that guidance, showing how it can be done is really something special. Initially, I actually started coaching rugby because that was what I knew. But rugby is a very niche market, and I wanted to help more people. That was kind of how I got into coaching.”
Mentoring was something instinctual for Marc. The more he did it, the better he’d gotten at it — and his philosophy also extends to everyday lifestyle. “It’s not only the mentality of being an athlete, but also understanding that you need to train in order for you to function better,” Marc says. “So, it’s part of my lifestyle. The same way people get up and say, ‘I need to have breakfast and then I need to go to work.’ For me, I just prioritise, ‘Okay, I need to get up, I need to train, breakfast, work.’ I’ll always fit it in somewhere, whether it’s before work, after, during a lunch break. It’s part of my regime. And it takes a long time for people to understand that because they believe fitness is a choice, whereas I don’t see it as a choice. I see it as like, ‘I’ve got to do it.’ It’s like doing the dishes, right? You’ve got to do the dishes in order to have clean plates.”
As a fitness mentor, Marc takes individualism very seriously. He has people he’s looked up to throughout his career, of course, but also believes that “people shouldn’t compare that with their own fitness journey, because every fitness journey is personal and it’s different”. “I had a lot of great mentors, Roy Kinikinilau, Tamati Ellison… they really looked after me when I went into professional rugby and they really helped me grow as a player,” Marc recounts. “They would often take time out of their day to make sure I’m doing the right thing even though they didn’t have to. And it taught me also to pay it forward to the next generation.”
For Marcus, his fitness journey began sometime during college, when he’d had a major wakeup call. “Back then, I was overweight,” he shares. “A lot of video games, a lot of sitting for long hours. That was when I thought, ‘Oh, something is wrong… I should probably start doing something.’ And the first thing I ever got into was actually boxing. I was a bit into martial arts. Growing up, I watched wrestling and things like that.”
Marcus used to box competitively in the country, even representing Selangor on state level. But when the pandemic hit, he couldn’t go for training; his coach also left for the States, and Marcus couldn’t seamlessly make the switch when it came to his styles and methods. Eventually, he left the scene behind, got into fitness, strength and conditioning, group classes and such — and ultimately, HYROX. Today, he helms Afterburn Training Club alongside his business partner, where it has established itself pretty solidly within the fitness community.
“I’m not sure if a lot of people know this, but how we first started was that we actually started in the living room during the pandemic,” Marcus says, tracing back the origin of Afterburn. “We started by running virtual online classes through Zoom; we weren’t even like a physical studio to begin with. We got the word out online. After a year, we slowly brought it outdoors, through road cycling camps at the park and stuff. And then, one-ish year later, we decided to open up our own studio. We prioritised people. Because what I truly believe is that without people, gyms are just empty spaces. So, we prioritise a lot about people, about human interaction. Community.”
Now Afterburn is officially a HYROX Affiliate Gym, specialising in Cross Training, strength, endurance and more. “I figured, before we jumped on to the affiliates, why not try this thing ourselves first?” Marcus recounts his first HYROX experience three years ago. “So, my partner and I looked up the race, the nearest was in Hong Kong. We tried it for the first time. We were very skeptical about it at first, but when we participated, we straight away fell in love with it. Ever since then, it’s one of the things we look forward to doing. Then I figured that if we put in the real work here, brands and sponsors would start reaching out, and we might be able to achieve something if we really put our heart and soul into it. So, why not give it a shot?”
Marcus has since competed in numerous elite HYROX races, and also frequently conducts local HYROX conditioning and track workshops. He and his partner have also been improving, gradually beating their own personal records and getting faster every single time. “We weren’t even, like, runners to begin with. Being able to run is one of the things. I never thought I would be running. Influencing a lot of people to start doing their first race, that’s something I’m very proud of as well.”
The goal with Afterburn is to also create a safe space for those who, like Marcus, have decided to start their fitness journey a little bit later in life. “I think a lot of people are very mindful of how their body looks,” Marcus muses. “A lot of people might be uncomfortable in starting their fitness journey because of how they look, regardless of how their fitness level is. There’s that mindset of, ‘I feel like I can only start when I’m at a certain body shape, so I have a certain fitness level and that’s when I should start.’ But I think everyone should start as they are. Just getting started is always the first step to getting better. So, there is no right time. The best time is literally now.”
Ivan’s fitness journey is even more unorthodox than the other two. He’d pursued law for much of his life, studying the Bar in the UK and even returning to Malaysia to complete his pupillage. He eventually climbed up the corporate ladder and became a well-respected senior lawyer in one of our country’s largest law firms. “Legal was the ideal pathway that my parents wanted me to venture into,” Ivan reveals, “but fitness was always there too, supporting me. It was kind of my getaway.”
Law is famously a stressful field, known for its long hours and sleepless nights. “Fitness was the outlet to the stress that legal brought on,” Ivan says. I mean, it’s something that you really need to have passion for. Not to say that I didn’t have that. It’s just the commitment; it’s a very enduring commitment of ours. And if I were to look at my boss, and my boss’s boss, they didn’t have much time with their families. They didn’t have time for themselves, and for their health. It was something that I want to bring a change in my own life.”
Despite his seemingly sudden shift into the fitness business, sports has always been integrated into Ivan’s life. “I started out very competitive in basketball ,” he shares, “and growing up, my introduction to weightlifting came about when I was 16. I followed my dad to the gyms, and that was when I started lifting. At first, I had no idea what I was doing. I attended group classes on the treadmill, and I was just trying to figure it out. And when I attended group classes, it wasn’t really about the exercise, but it was the energy, the sense of community that I was really impressed with. And it was the first time as well that I saw how fitness could really influence people’s lives, and that built my confidence and changed my mindset, my approach to working out.”
Ivan’s inclination to coach and to mentor actually began even long before he left the legal field. “I got the opportunity to start a small HIIT class at a shoplot in Cheras,” Ivan tells me. “I remember just holding a mic next to the speaker. I had no formal coaching background at the time, but I remember just standing in front of the room and feeling completely energised. I realised that what I really enjoyed the most wasn’t the exercise, but to be able to push people beyond their capabilities and allow them to see a different aspect of fitness. From then on, I started coaching.”
Ivan juggled all this while still succeeding in law, “For years, I lived a double life,” he goes on, laughing. “Being a lawyer was tough, so I had the goal of coming to office very early. I did my own workouts in the morning. I skipped lunch most days. I made sure to complete my work before I headed off to coach at night. I lived this double life for six years, and the more I coached, the more I realised that fitness was never just about physical transformation. I just really enjoy it. That was when I knew that it could be something bigger than a hobby, that I wanted to dedicate my life into building this fitness career.”Along the way, the idea of CHASE came about. Located in Bangsar, CHASE focuses on indoor cycling, reformer Pilates and strength training. But most importantly, CHASE builds upon Ivan’s philosophy of enjoying fitness. “How it came about is that a very good friend kept encouraging me with the idea of starting a fitness studio on my own,” Ivan opens up. “And it wasn’t something that I actively planned for, but it immediately resonated with me because I had spent years looking at fitness from a coach’s perspective as well as a member’s perspective. And from the beginning, we didn’t just want to open yet another fitness studio. We wanted to create an environment where people are able to come in and genuinely build a community, where we’ll be able to encourage to support one another in fitness.”
Like most of us, Ivan’s strong and determined mindset was developed over time. He’d undergone multiple hurdles in life, whether in the legal field or fitness, and each one had taught him something new that he could apply to his current lifestyle. “There have been moments where things don’t go according to plan, but those experiences taught me ultimately on what I could do to make CHASE stronger,” Ivan says. “So, what really helped me to bounce back is to remember why. Simon Sinek once said that in his book, you know, that if your goals are purely built around money or built around success or recognition, it’s very easy to quit when things are difficult. But when you are really driven by purpose, you develop a different level of resilience.”
creative direction MALLIE MARAN | interview PUTERI YASMIN SURAYA | photography HERRY CHIA | videography STANLEY LOH | hair styling ERANTHE LOO | makeup artist SHIYO JOO | styled by ISAAC CHONG | assistant stylist ZHIYIN | wardrobe COACH, JD SPORTS
Find out more about MARC LE, MARCUS TAN, IVAN FREDRIC in the latest issue of LSA Digital Cover Vol. 046 HERE.
Note : The information in this article is accurate as of the date of publication.
