CT Fletcher

C. T. Ali Fletcher is an American vlogger, media personality, actor, personal trainer, and former powerlifter and bodybuilder. He is best known as a three-time World Bench Press Champion and a three-time World Strict Curl Champion. Over the course of his career, he expanded his work into digital media, personal training, and fitness facility management.

Fletcher was born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, on June 8, 1959, to Ogie Rea and Walter Fletcher, and grew up alongside an older brother named Walt. At the time of his birth, his mother was a housewife and his father was a field worker. When he was one year old, his family relocated to Los Angeles County, California, settling in Watts and later Compton. He grew up with an abusive father who preached in a four-car garage. When he began junior high school, the family moved to nearby Lakewood, where his father invested in his own church. Fletcher acquired a job at a gas station at twelve years old.

In 1977, at eighteen years old, Fletcher joined the United States Army and was stationed in Germany. While stationed there, he developed an interest in martial arts. He began taking Karate classes in 1979, eventually earning a second degree black belt. In 1980, Fletcher shifted his focus toward weightlifting and bodybuilding. Although he was initially interested in bodybuilding, powerlifting soon caught his interest.

Fletcher later transitioned into content creation and business. In 2013, he launched his YouTube channel. Continuing his career in the fitness industry, he opened his own facility, Iron Addicts Gym, in 2016.

Throughout his adult life, Fletcher experienced serious health issues related to an inherited heart condition. In 2001, his doctor alerted him regarding his hypertension, leaving him disabled at forty-two years old. After his mother died from congestive heart failure in 2004—a condition that claimed her life and the lives of all nine of her siblings—Fletcher was admitted to a hospital in Long Beach, California, in 2005. He was transferred to UCI Medical Center, where he underwent life-saving open-heart surgery.

Fletcher's heart problems persisted in later years. On an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, he revealed that he had suffered another heart attack in June 2017 and hoped to get on the waiting list for a heart transplant. On May 5, 2018, he announced via Twitter that a heart had been found for him, and he underwent a heart transplant surgery lasting over eleven hours the following day. During a November 2017 appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Fletcher also discussed his past use of anabolic steroids, noting that he was steroid-free at the time of the interview.

Fletcher resides in Signal Hill, California. He was previously married to his high school sweetheart, with whom he had children, before the marriage ended in the early 1990s. He later married a woman he met while working at the post office. He and his wife have seven children in total, including a child named Samson born in 1995.