[Interview] Melissa Witmer on Ultimate Fitness

Melissa Witmer is the mind and body behind The Ultimate Athlete Project, a fitness program designed specifically for Ultimate performance. She has graced us with her fitness and training knowledge on this blog already, and so we were happy to finally catch her for a more thorough interview.

We sat down with her ahead of the Ultimate Athlete Project’s reopening this week to find out more about Melissa herself, her journey through fitness, the UAP, and a brief look at the boatload of other projects Witmer is involved in.

Read those previous blogposts here:
Three Agility Drills for Ultimate
2 Easy Exercises to Warmup your Feet

Had you done strength and conditioning work before you started playing Ultimate? And when did you first partake in fitness for Ultimate?

Like many players in the US at the time, I started playing when I got to university. That was in 1996 at Virginia Tech. I was introduced to strength training in high school with the girls field hockey team. I loved it and continued strength training as a normal part of my fitness routine even before I started training for ultimate. It wasn’t until much later that I made the transition from playing ultimate to stay in shape to training for ultimate.

I started to train for ultimate when I was in graduate school. I left my PhD program in chemistry with no backup plan and decided to just pursue all of the things I loved for a year or two...

What was your main goal in starting the UAP?

The Ultimate Athlete Project was built to improve the way that players train for ultimate. Ultimate players were already putting time into training...

In your experience, where do athletes who design their own fitness plans often go wrong? What aspects do they over and under emphasize?

Common mistakes:

• too much volume
• prioritizing endurance over power
• too little focus (trying to improve everything at once)
• deciding strength is important and jumping on a common barbell plan that does not include functional strength
• deciding functional strength is important and neglecting getting really strong

But the biggest problem is really not having a plan...

The UAP is customizable to a specific athlete’s needs, and caters to any level of players (no previous fitness experience required), but how does that work? How is this fitness program able to work for the variety of athletes it caters to?

The UAP is a system built on solid scientific principles...

Subscription to the UAP opened on Monday the 9th of October. Why is subscription opening at this time, and only open for a limited period?

In the past the UAP has been open for a week at a time during various opening windows...

You first launched the UAP in 2011, how has the program evolved since then?

The principles behind athletic performance training have not changed dramatically since 2011. The UAP is committed to using scientifically validated training methods...

You’re very well known for your work on Ultimate fitness with the UAP, but that is not the limit of your contribution to Ultimate specific knowledge. What other projects are you currently working on?

Our newest adventure is The Ultimate Skills Project. Like The Ultimate Athlete Project...

Melissa, thank you so much for your time.

The Ultimate Athlete Project and The Ultimate Skills Project are currently accepting new members.

The Ultimate Athlete Project provides a complete strength and conditioning program designed with athletic performance for ultimate in mind...

The Ultimate Skills Project provides skills training you can do in 1-2 hours per week...