An instructor puts participants through their paces with a log at Coopers Beach in Northland. Photo / Dean Purcell

An instructor puts participants through their paces with a log at Coopers Beach in Northland. Photo / Dean Purcell

It's a cold and wet night in the Far North, where two boys are struggling to hold a telegraph pole above their heads as they run through mud, up and down hills, over and over again.

One has convictions for assault, the other for burglary and both are on "night PT" (physical training) - two gruelling hours of exercises after collecting three "strikes" for their indiscretions, including a punch-up between themselves during day three of the Male Youth New Direction (New Directions) programme.

The lifeskills course - run partly along paramilitary lines - is helping turn the lives around of some of the Auckland region's worst youth offenders.

One of the boys, exhausted after an earlier and particularly brutal PT that day, drops to his knees, barely clinging to the pole.

His lungs - battered by smoking and cannabis use - are screaming for air.

"Pick up your toothpick and move, right now!" calls instructor Soane Papali'i, a former able seaman.

Through clouds of his own steam, the boy utters a few expletives before responding: "It's a pretty heavy [expletive] toothpick, sir."

There's more grunt work - log carrying , push-ups, vomit-inducing sprints and carting of two 20-litre jerry cans up a steep and slippery hill.

"These are what we call accountability sessions," says Steve Boxer, creator of the New Directions programme and a former soldier who completed stints in Malaysia and Darwin with the New Zealand Army in the early 1990s.

"We are trying to make these boys realise that for every action there's a consequence.

"For many, they've never had this spelled out to them before."

For those who attend Boxer's New Directions programme - 20 weeks of intense discipline, mentoring and life lessons - it's their last throw of the dice. The boys are typically Maori or Polynesian, aged 14 to 17, with convictions for crimes from burglary and tagging to wounding with intent to injure and grievous bodily harm.

After being stripped of their belongings, their gang identities and most of their hair, the boys undertake possibly the hardest and most regulated 10 days of their lives during the programme's army-like away phase.

Out are PlayStations, cellphones, hanging out with mates all night and and the droopy swagger and gangster-style posing.

In army-style kit they learn to iron, get 7am wake-ups, must ask for permission to urinate, march with straight backs and utter the frequent and loud use of "sir'.