Andreas Kastner, BA
My name is Andreas Kastner. I’m a sport scientist, strength and conditioning coach, lecturer, and competitive powerlifter from Pfaffenhofen an der Ilm, Germany.
My coaching career started in football. During these early years, I completed my UEFA B-level coaching licence, which gave me my first structured education as a coach. However, I was never satisfied with simply applying drills, copying common coaching habits, or relying on tradition alone. I wanted to understand why certain methods worked, why others did not, and how I could become more effective in supporting athletes. This curiosity first led me to engage with sport science in my own time and eventually to study sport science formally in 2019.
The sport science degree provided me with a wide-ranging foundation in human performance and research-informed thinking, including physiology, biomechanics, training theory, and scientific methods. However, I was especially drawn to the training science elements of the course because they connected directly to the questions I had as a coach. To sharpen this focus and move closer to applied work with athletes, I enrolled on the MSc Strength and Conditioning programme at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, in 2023. This pathway has further developed my critical thinking and strengthened my ability to translate scientific knowledge into coaching practice. While this is only one part of my coaching approach, it remains an important one: good coaching should be reflective, evidence-informed, and meaningful for the individual athlete.
Alongside these roles, I have also coached personal fitness clients with goals such as improving body composition, developing healthier lifestyle habits, preparing for endurance challenges such as marathons, and building strength and physical confidence in everyday life. This has included work with diverse populations, including older adults, which has broadened my understanding of how training needs to be adapted to different goals, abilities, and life contexts.
Powerlifting has been central to my own sporting life since 2021. I have competed in thirteen regional and national competitions, currently represent Viecherschmiede Powersport e. V., and became German National Champion in the deadlift in 2025. I am also involved in the club as a coach and official.
These experiences have given me substantial practical insight into the realities of the sport: building a total, managing fatigue, selecting attempts, making weight, handling competition pressure, and expressing strength reliably on the platform. Over time, the logical consequence was to bring my academic background, applied coaching experience, and personal involvement in powerlifting together in my own coaching platform, Impulse Powerlifting.
My aim is to help lifters understand their training, recognise patterns, communicate honestly, and make better decisions over time. The values that guide my work are persistence, ambition, enjoyment, independence, honesty, and respect.
The approach I follow with Impulse Powerlifting is systemic rather than limited to periodisation alone. I view performance as part of a wider environment. Therefore, coaching means designing training that is not only effective but also repeatable, adaptable, and sustainable. You can find more detailed information about how this approach is applied in practice in my coaching offers.