Language Matters
The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms. Most programs never get there.
Socrates said it best. The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms. Two and a half thousand years later, most sports performance departments still haven’t figured it out.
Walk into any college program, and you’ll find six coaches teaching the squat six different ways. One exercise with 3 different names. Different coaching cues, different levels of squat depth.
That’s a language problem.
This is one of the 60 mental models I discussed at the KU Sports Performance Clinic. You can see the remaining mental models in the full presentation below.
THE TITLE PROBLEM
Start with the simplest version of this: what do you call yourself?
Director of Strength and Conditioning is an accurate title for about 30 percent of what most of us actually do. We program. We monitor load. We manage recovery, sleep, sometimes nutrition, mental readiness, movement quality, injury mitigation, staff development, budget, and athlete culture. We wear ten different hats, and yet we’ve accepted a title that signals we lift weights for a living.
This matters more than most people acknowledge. Much of what you can command in pay and resources comes directly from how administration, head coaches, and athletes perceive your role. Are you the weights guy? Or are you a sports performance professional responsible for preparing athletes physically and psychologically for competition?
The difference in that perception is the difference in your budget, your staff resources, your facility, and your salary.
I changed our staff title to Elon Sports Performance years ago. Others have gone with Athletic Performance. Buddy Morris coined the term Physical Preparation Coach, which is better, but I still think it undersells the psychological and cultural work embedded in this job. The point isn’t which phrase is perfect. The point is that the title signals the scope of your work before you ever open your mouth.
I used to joke with our DC. He would poke fun at our title. So I would poke fun at his calling him the Coordinator of Fronts and Coverages. I think you get the point. If we take any role and dumb it down into two areas of that role, the title undersells what it is we actually do.
Your title is the first sentence of your job description. Make it accurate.
My current title is Assistant AD for Peak Performance, as I oversee not only our sports performance team, but sports nutrition and sports science efforts. This freed up the title Director of Sports Performance, which we were able to elevate Cam Ringstead, who has been with us at Elon since 2018. When future employers see his resume, he now creates a larger interest simply because he directs a department.
WHAT SHARED LANGUAGE ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE
Titles are the visible edge of a much deeper problem. The real cost of undefined language lives inside the daily operation of a performance staff.
When I was at the University of Iowa working under Chris Doyle, I watched what a high-functioning language system looks like in practice. It was one of the most disciplined organizational environments out there. When we taught the squat, every coach taught it the same way. Not approximately the same. Word for word. The cues were identical. The correction sequence was identical. The standard for depth was identical. The progression was identical. It didn’t matter which coach you worked with; you got the same information delivered the same way.
That’s not accidental. That’s the product of intentional language architecture.
When I arrived at Elon, the contrast was stark. Four current staff members. Multiple names for the same exercises. Lift cards that looked like they were designed in different programs. Delivered in completely different ways. No unified terminology for loading schemes, intensity prescriptions, or movement standards. Coaches who had come from different systems were doing their best, but doing it in different languages.
The athlete in that environment pays the price. They walk away from one coach’s session and into another’s and receive contradictory instructions. They don’t know whose standard is right. So they apply none of them with full confidence.
This becomes especailly important at the mid-major level where turnover is common. Each time they get a new coach, it is a program overhaul because a system isn’t in place, a coach is.
Now we have a system so that no matter the coach, the athletes’ experience remains consistent. It is a plug-and-play approach that has allowed us, even with part-time staff members for many years, to maintain consistency throughout our program in spite of consistent turnover.
Inconsistent Language = Inconsistent Standard = Inconsistent Athlete Development
IT’S NOT JUST SPORTS PERFORMANCE
This is a documented organizational problem that transcends our field. The most operationally excellent organizations on the planet, military, surgical, and aviation, have invested enormous resources into shared language precisely because the cost of ambiguity is catastrophic.
The U.S. Army’s doctrine manuals run thousands of pages, not because the Army enjoys paperwork, but because when commands are executed in high-stakes, high-speed environments, there is zero margin for misinterpretation. Every term is defined. Every signal means one thing and only one thing.
Aviation standardized cockpit communication after a series of crashes in the 1970s were traced back to ambiguous language between pilots and co-pilots. The industry didn’t just fix the aircraft. They rewrote the communication protocols, defined the exact words, the exact call-and-response sequences, and the exact escalation language. Standardized language became a non-negotiable safety infrastructure.
Surgical teams implemented the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist after research showed that a significant portion of surgical errors were rooted not in technical failure but in communication breakdown. Standardizing the language around handoffs, equipment, and role clarity measurably reduced mortality.
We are not doing surgery. But the principle is identical. When terms are undefined, execution is inconsistent. When execution is inconsistent, outcomes are unreliable. When outcomes are unreliable, your program cannot improve systematically, because you can’t identify what’s working and what isn’t.
WHERE UNDEFINED LANGUAGE BREAKS PERFORMANCE PROGRAMS
The Romanian Deadlift is also called the RDL, stiff leg deadlift, the hip hinge, the straight-leg deadlift, and the hamstring deadlift, depending on whose program you came from. Every athlete you inherit has a different definition. If you never standardize, you never know what they’re actually doing.
What does “heavy” mean? What does “maximal effort” mean? What is the difference between a 7, 8, and 9 on your RPE scale, and is every coach defining those the same way? If the answer is no, your load data is unreliable.
“Push the floor away” and “drive through your heels” may describe the same intent, but they produce different movement patterns in different athletes. Inconsistent cues produce inconsistent patterns. Standardize the cue, then teach coaches how to modify delivery without changing the underlying language.
What constitutes a “light day”? What is “active recovery” versus “rest”? If your medical staff, position coaches, and performance coaches have different definitions, athletes receive contradictory guidance the moment they’re managing a soft-tissue issue.
What does “discipline” mean in your program? What does “accountability” look like behaviorally? Abstract values without behavioral definitions are posters on a wall. Specific, observable language turns values into standards you can actually coach.
Every undefined term is a gap in your system that an athlete will fill with their own interpretation.
BUILDING A LANGUAGE INFRASTRUCTURE
This is not complicated. It requires discipline, not genius.
Start with a master exercise library. Every movement your program uses gets one name. One cue sequence. One coaching standard. It gets written down. Every coach learns it. New staff are onboarded to it before they touch an athlete. This isn’t micromanagement, it’s quality control. Take it one step further and add a video for each exercise so athletes can visually see a perfect demonstration.
Build a terminology document for intensity prescription. Define every loading term you use. If you use RPE, define the scale concretely. If you use percentage-based loading, define your testing protocols so that your 85% is actually 85% across the entire staff. If you use words like “submaximal” or “near-maximal,” define the behavioral and velocity-based markers that correspond to those terms.
Systemize exercise library additions. When a new exercise gets added to the program, it gets named, defined, and videoed. When a term is being used inconsistently, correct it explicitly, not because one coach is wrong, but because the system requires alignment. This is best done when one staff member is left in charge of maintaining the exercise library. Clear ownership of the task increases the success of outcomes.
Extend it to culture. If your program values “compete every day,” define what that looks like. Behavioral definitions are the bridge between stated values and lived standards.
TITLE, LANGUAGE, AND THE PAY YOU COMMAND
Bring it back to the beginning.
If you want to be compensated as a high-level performance professional, you have to operate as one. That starts with how you define your role, the title, and extends to how you run your department. A director who can walk into an administrative meeting and articulate a unified, measurable, systematically delivered performance model is better positioned than the weights guy who runs good sessions.
Administration funds what it understands. Head coaches trust what produces consistent results. Athletes commit to programs that feel organized and intentional. All of that begins with language.
You cannot measure outcomes you haven’t defined. You cannot improve systems you can’t describe. You cannot communicate value you can’t articulate.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Your title is the first sentence of your value proposition. Make it accurate.
Shared language is not a preference. It is the infrastructure of a functional performance department.
Six coaches using six terms for the same exercise is an organizational failure disguised as a minor inconvenience.
The best performance programs look different on the surface. They all have one thing in common beneath it: everyone is speaking the same language.
Build the dictionary. Hold the standard.
Socrates would have a field day in a performance department. Half the disagreements about training aren’t disagreements — they’re two people using “speed” or “intensity” to mean different things. You can’t measure what you haven’t defined, and you can’t build a verified record on top of undefined terms. Definition is the unglamorous first step nobody wants to do.
Another solid one Nick. Needed the reminder how key this is.