As a coach he prepared a series of Olympic champions including Aleksey Vakhonin, Vasily Alekseyev, David Rigert, Nikolay Kolesnikov, Aleksandr Voronin and Viktor Tregubov.

The rest of the family was sent to a labor camp in Siberia, where Plyukfelder started to work at a coal mine at the age of 14.

He retired shortly after the 1964 Olympics and had a long and successful career as a coach in Shakhty, which he turned into a major Soviet weightlifting school.

[1] In the early 1990s, due to a conflict with Vasily Alekseyev, he immigrated to Germany, where he has a large family of wife, three daughters and five grandchildren.

He continues daily training with weights through his 90s, and won one masters world title in 1992, but decided not to compete again due to lack of interest in competitions.