Angela Kattula
“Powerlifting for me has always been about so much more than simply doing a sport, so seeing the benefits of success in powerlifting in other’s lives is exciting.”
Biography.
Angela Kattula began powerlifting on her high school’s team for her senior year of high school and hasn’t stopped since. After graduating, she began coaching friends who were interested in strength training, and she soon realized how much she enjoyed helping others get started in the gym. This led her to eventually help coach her former high school’s team and work alongside other coaches to help improve and grow the program, which now has nearly 10x as many lifters as it did only two years ago.
Coaching was a path she knew she wanted to pursue and get better at, so she was looking forward to learning more after being chosen for an internship opportunity with The Strength Athlete a little over a year ago now. She has been with The Strength Athlete as a junior coach since September 2021.
From One Athlete To Another
While our main goal is typically in making athletes stronger, Angela thrives when powerlifting itself serves as a vehicle for enriching athletes’ lives. The lessons learned in powerlifting then go on to become life lessons and build mental toughness, attention to detail, a sense of problem-solving, and more. All of the small lessons learned make lifters’ lives better, too.
As an elite athlete herself, Angela finds she can relate better with athletes and what they’re going through. Whether that’s through sports psychology and knowing what it’s like to compete in big competitions, to nerves, body dysmorphia, burnout, and the storm of emotions that come with huge successes and failures, too. She knows what it feels like to be extremely happy with herself, confident, and be motivated, and disciplined when it comes to training. Having felt all of these positive and negative emotions, she can relate better with athletes.
Some of her favorite topics in strength sport include nutrition for powerlifters, technique in the squat, bench press, and deadlift, and encouraging more women to start strength training.
Spreadsheet
As Angela gets to know athletes better, training continues to improve, like it would in any system where coaches are analyzing what’s going on and responding to the athlete’s journey in real-time. It’s through this process that she hones a semi-custom approach to an approach that feels tailor-made, including adjustments to exercises, training days, training volume, intensity schema, velocity, and any other relevant training detail.
Training is also about more than working toward specific numbers—it’s about keeping athletes healthy and well-rounded. She tends to approach training holistically with an eye to athlete motivation and buy-in. Training approaches continue to evolve as long as the athlete continues to train!
