Coming out of a family with divorced parents, Malik Abdul-Haqq turned to drugs to fill a void in his life, but he received a wake-up call when he was sentenced to a three-year sentence in a California state prison. To get his life back on track, he traded his drug addiction for an addiction to the iron and weightlifting.
A longtime bodybuilding enthusiast, Malik listened the advice from his father and created a plan for surviving prison: He would read the books his father gave him and exercise every day. And because weightlifting has been banned in California state prisons since 1998, Malik had to get creative.
When he wasn’t running or performing body-weight movements, he would fill old T-shirts with gravel and use them as weights in the yard.
Upon his release, Abdul-Haqq decided he no longer wanted to focus exclusively on bodybuilding. Instead of being a “specialist”, he wanted to be “an all-around badass,” and CrossFit’s emphasis on constantly varied functional movement was a better fit for his long-term goals.
After receiving encouragement from the coaches in his CrossFit community in Oakland, California, he completed the CrossFit Level 1 Certificate Course. Abdul-Haqq plans to open his own gym and offer after-school fitness programs for local kids someday.
Take a look at the whole inspirational documentary :
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