Profile: Greg Plitt

Greg Plitt

Birthdate:  November 3, 1979
Height: 6'11"
Weight: 195lb

Athletic Background: In various interviews, Greg has described his family as being quite athletic.  His grandfather was a pro in two sports (hockey and baseball) and his dad was drafted by the Mets.  Greg said he started playing hockey at age 3.  At age 7, he could do 100 laps in the pool, 300 situps, and 300 pushups in a day.  In the sixth grade, his dad bought a home gym, and from that point on Greg became a fitness buff. 

In high school, Greg was an all-American wrestler in the 189lb class, and won titles of Maryland state champion and 2nd overall in the United States.  Greg was nominated to attend and his application was accepted to West Point, where he surpassed the Army's physical fitness test bycompleting 168 pushups and 142 situps in two minutes.  Greg graduated from West Point in 2000 and served as a captain in the army Rangers.  


Training Routine:

• Greg follows a 5-day split; 1: chest, 2: back, 3: arms, 4: shoulders, 5: legs.
• 8 exercises/muscle group, 4 sets/exercise, 10-20 reps/set.
• In the gym at 5:30am for ~1.5 hours/day, 7 days/week. 
• Always finishes with 10 minutes of ab exercises. 
• Performs cardio at night (11pm-midnight): running 15-20miles/4 days a week.

Nutrition: Greg eats one huge meal a day between 1 and 5pm, sometimes two pizzas, sometimes 5 pound of chicken.

Training Philosophy/Goals: Greg says his goals are performance and muscular definition rather than mass.  "I never go in there looking to lit a certain weight.  I lift to find that burn."  "I'm not looking for size, I'm looking to stay lean and shredded."

Vitamins

Ward Patrick, personal trainer, retired marine

My husband Chris and I recently visited my cousin and her husband in Austin.  She is in a nutrition graduate program, and Chris mentioned to her that I've been reading about and trying various supplementation regimens for weight training.  She mentioned a quite pointer on vitamin supplementation that has helped me alter when and how I take which vitamins.

Vitamins can be classified as water- or fat-soluble.  As the classifications imply, these vitamins are absorbed by the body by combination with water or fats, but they are also retained differently.

 Water-soluble vitamins must be consumed with water in order for the body to absorb them during digestion.  This is not a hard thing to come by in my diet, as I drink a lot water throughout the day.  However, it is also important to note that water-soluble vitamins are not stored by the body; upon digestion, these vitamins are transferred to the bloodstream and distributed throughout the body, they are then immediately filtered out of the blood by the kidneys and passed out of the body in urine.  This is why you "piss gold" after taking a multivitamin--it's all the water-soluble vitamins exiting the body.

Water-Soluble Vitamins

B and C

As the name implies, fat-soluble vitamins must be consumed with fats in order for the body to absorb them.  This bit of knowledge has changed my vitamin supplementation timing slightly.  I used to take a vitamin C & E supplement immediately after training with my post-workout shake.  That's fine for the vitamin C, which is water soluble, but its a waste for the vitamin E, which must dissolve in fats in order to be absorbed by the body.  I usually avoid fats for an hour or so after training in order to not slow down my digestion of the protein and carbs I take postworkout.  So now I've cut out the vitamin E supplementation immediately after working out and delayed it to until my first postworkout meal, in which I always try to include good fats.

But there's more.  Unlike water-soluble vitamins, fat-soluble vitamins are stored in the body in the liver for several days.  For people like me who supplement their normal diet with additional fat-soluble vitamins, there is a chance of over-supplementation.  It is possible to saturate the liver with too much of one or more fat-soluble vitamins, leading to various liver conditions.  So be careful.  My takeaway from this is to follow the vitamin supplementation amounts recommended by sports medicine experts (see the excellent book Nutrition Timing), and to be careful to reduce or stop supplementation with fat-soluble vitamins when I am taking time off from training.

Fat-Soluble Vitamins

A, D, E, and K

Back in the Saddle

 James "Flex" Lewis, IFBB Pro

Wow, so this is the first post of 2011?  I've been sucking at this blog!  But I'm happy to report that I haven't been sucking in the gym.  I've been training on a regular basis, setting and achieving goals (damn it feels great when that happens), experimenting with different training methods/exercise configurations, and generally feeling great. 

I am loving training.  It's honestly one of the top three best things going in my life.  When my alarm goes off at 4:45am, I'm excited about getting up and out the door and moving some iron around.  I love the sights and sounds and smell and feel of the gym. 

I'm trying to make the most of it while I'm still young and able to train--I know life is short and before I know it I'll be older and weaker.  But for now I'm grateful to be mobile, and I feel like the shit looking back over the last year of my exercise logs watching the poundages gradually moving upward.