Amotti in real life isn’t that different from his TV and online personas – positive, real, humble – but taller and more sculpted than the version you’re familiar with on the screen. And might we add, he exudes a still-detectable sense of disbelief that he’d struck the Toto equivalent in his fitness career.
In any case, the exercise enthusiast certainly hadn’t let his fitness schedule slide post-win and while on the road. “I managed to work out twice yesterday,” he said of his morning routine. Yes, he’d already been to the gym twice on a Friday morning when the rest of us had barely finished our lukewarm kopi in the office.
“Even when I’m travelling, feeling that post-exercise joy is important to me, and I’ll always add exercise to my itinerary,” he said.
Not that he was a nobody pre-Physical: 100. Amotti (a mishmash of his former Instagram handle @armour_hong and the cutesy Korean suffix “tti”) was, and still is, a popular professional CrossFitter and fitness YouTuber in Seoul – and certainly no stranger to autograph and picture requests, even right in the middle of a training session as we saw. “The most memorable autograph was for a fan in Singapore who asked me to sign his face,” he laughed.
But the man would rather you let him finish his set before approaching him in the gym, especially when he is deadlifting 210kg, bench-pressing 120kg or back-squatting 190kg (which, by the way, are his PBs or personal bests) – and all done with an ankle injury sustained from a car accident in 2021 that required 10 hours of surgery to fix.