The Structure and Task Model of Human Performance
by Thomas Newman
Every coach remembers the conversation that cracked something open for them. Mine happened on an ordinary afternoon with Mark Stephenson. He’s the kind of coach whose fingerprints are all over the field even if most people don’t know his name—the former president of the NSCA, founder of the Tactical Strength and Conditioning Program, and one of the architects who brought human performance into military and high-stress environments.
One day, we were sitting in his office talking about training philosophy—sets, percentages, INOL, and rest intervals—when he stopped mid-sentence, turned to his whiteboard, and wrote two words: Structure and Task. Then he drew a few stick figures in different positions. I nodded politely, pretending to get it. He smiled like he’d seen that look a thousand times.
“No, really,” he said. “Your body is a structure. Completing a task within that structure—that’s the entire purpose of training.”
That sentence completely changed how I saw performance.
When Mark talked about structure, he didn’t mean posture drills or mobility routines. He meant the full connection between the brain and the body—a brain-first approach to human performance. He defined it simply: stance is everything below the belly button, posture is everything above it. Together, they form the body’s operating system. Every movement runs through a series of interconnected structures.
The mistake most coaches make is thinking of structure as something fixed, like a skeleton. But structure is dynamic; it shifts with every demand. Shooting a free throw or swinging a bat isn’t one movement—it’s thousands of micro-structures firing and stabilizing in sequence. If you could slice a motion like an MRI, you’d see layers of cooperation—tiny systems working in concert to create one seamless action. Research shows that even a three-degree change in range across a plane of motion creates an entirely new neural pathway. That means every pitch, every swing, every cut is a brand-new challenge to the nervous system.
Mark’s point was simple: you can build the biggest engine in the world, but if the wiring and the brain can’t process information, select the right response, and execute under stress, failure is inevitable. That’s what happens when we focus solely on strength without understanding structure. The athlete squats five hundred pounds but can’t stabilize in a split stance or react in chaos. Another athlete, buried under the fear of failure, turns the most routine play into career-spiraling paralysis. The potential for success exists, but it’s always governed by the weakest link in the system.
Coaches love to defend their programs. “This plan works,” they’ll say. And maybe it does—for athletes whose structures happen to fit the plan. But that’s not coaching; that’s coincidence. Every athlete is built differently—bone lengths, tendon insertions, muscle fiber types, joint laxity, cognitive wiring. Evolution built diversity into us for a reason. Our job is to understand it, not flatten it.
That’s what Mark meant by structure and task. Before prescribing a load, understand what system it’s being loaded onto. Before correcting a movement, understand what and why that structure produced it. Otherwise, you’re chasing theoretical models, creating fictitious solutions, and planting biomechanical “mind viruses” in athletes who are just trying to get one percent better.
Take a defensive back. When he backpedals, his structure is grounded—connected and force-transmitting. The moment he jumps for a ball, the structure changes—airborne, disconnected, about to collide with the earth from eight feet up. Three completely different realities in one play. If shoulder dislocations keep showing up in that position group, the problem isn’t bad luck—it’s a structural weak point.
This is where strength and conditioning merges with athletic training and physical therapy to form true human performance. The real purpose of resistance training isn’t to grow muscle or grind until someone throws up and calls it mental toughness. It’s to raise the mechanical breakpoint and expand the capacity of the structure to perform tasks under stress and fatigue. If something tears, collapses, or fades under pressure, the structure wasn’t strong enough for the physical stress. If a hitter’s performance unravels in front of a packed stadium, the structure wasn’t strong enough for the cognitive stress. Instead of drowning athletes in corrective fluff, have the hard conversation. Identify where the individual structure’s capacity runs out and where it’s most likely to fail in the future. Then make a plan to fix it.
Every athlete’s structure tells a story. One lineman moves like elastic steel; another like an industrial compactor that can crush anything. One pitcher stabilizes through tendons, another through muscle. You can’t force them into the same mold. You build around the structural genetics they have, then reinforce what the task demands. That’s the future of coaching—not hyper-focused, sport-specific training, but system-wide, structure-specific training.
Technology helps us see with greater granularity—force plates, wearables, readiness dashboards—but it doesn’t replace the coach’s eye. The rested, attentive human eye still sees context that no algorithm can: a hesitation before contact, a breath pattern under stress, a newborn baby in the front row.
Data should work with intuition, not replace it. As an industry, we need to protect that skill. In my opinion, that’s what separates real coaching from the endless line of sport-specific tech evangelists who’ve never coached a human being through a bad week. We all know that person—the self-proclaimed “[insert sport] Guru.”
And structure isn’t just bone and muscle. It’s biochemical. It’s cognitive. Jet-lag an athlete across three time zones and you’ve disrupted their structure. That’s why at Newman HP we focus obsessively on structure—tracking every variable that matters and expanding our domains of concern as both research and our real-world case studies evolve. For our clients, structure and success are inseparable—it is the sum of every process that supports the task.
For years, the industry’s favorite question has been, “Does this training transfer to the field?” The better question is, “Does this training address the weakest point in the athlete’s structure, and how does that affect their ability to complete the task?” When you get that answer right, transfer happens automatically.
A real-world example of this is why one of our baseball players gained seven pounds of lean mass during the grueling 162-game Major League Baseball season. The textbooks say in-season training is about maintenance. Our data says otherwise. We didn't chase volume; we chased structural integrity that recovered faster than the task demands of the season. We borrowed from football for tendon durability, from triathlon for in-game glucose management. The body doesn’t care where the method comes from—it only cares whether it can confidently handle the next task the brain demands.
When we onboard a new client, every athlete goes through the same sequence: define the task that gets them paid, build an athlete composite, identify the structures most frequently used, map known failure points, reinforce the weak links, and then overdevelop the areas that separate the elite from the average. It’s simple, but difficult to execute day in and day out.
I once told a 200-pound pitcher we were putting together a protein plan that would guarantee him the meat sweats for months. He laughed—until we showed him the walking distance from every hotel to the nearest kitchen and the daily schedule covering the entire MLB season. Then we broke down how we would hit his goal 2.2 grams of protein per kilo of bodyweight— that’s 45,600 grams of lean protein over the season—to meet this goal. That’s when it clicked for him. He was shocked when he saw how we had planned all the logistics to accomplish this goal. The only thing he had to decide was whether he wanted pickup or delivery. It’s not complicated— but it is an obsessive commitment to detail.
Mark’s lesson didn’t give me a new system. It gave me new eyes. It’s both a blessing and a curse—like the hidden arrow in the FedEx logo, you can’t unsee it. Now, when I work with athletes, I see the invisible systems underneath—the guarded stance, the subtle shift, the look of fear that signals a structure about to fail. I see where energy leaks, where cognition slips, where resilience cracks. And when an athlete learns to see it too—to view their sport through that same lens—it becomes something else entirely. It becomes the game within the game.
Structure and task. Two words that sound too simple to matter until you realize they’re the blueprint for everything. They explain why one athlete survives the grind while another fades. Why some careers thrive under chaos and others crumble.
Strength isn’t what you can lift. It’s the allostatic load your structure can handle while completing the task when everything around you is starting to break.
