Inside the OPEX Method Mentorship Week 7: Lifestyle & Nutrition
This blog series will document the 10 week experience of Dr. David Skolnik as he goes through the OPEX Method Mentorship. Follow along as we add to this blog each week.
Week 7: Why Lifestyle Coaching Matters More Than Training Alone
Every Program Is a Lifestyle Program
Carl said it best in the mentorship: every program is a lifestyle program. The question is not whether lifestyle matters, it is whether you treat it as part of coaching or pretend it is separate from the gym.
Your client lives in one single system. Their stress, sleep, food quality, hydration, schedule, and relationships all affect how they train and recover. The body does not split those things into boxes.
So when a client comes to you and says, “I just need a great program,” it is tempting to nod and write one. But if you want them to succeed, you have to think, “What has to be true in their life for this program to work?”
That shift in mindset changes your job. You are not only writing training. You are coaching a person, inside a lifestyle, who happens to be training.
Training Is Optional, Lifestyle Is Not
One of the strongest lines from the mentorship is, training is optional, lifestyle is not. Your client can skip a workout. They cannot skip sleeping, eating, or managing their day. They either do it well or poorly, but they do it.
As a coach, your own lifestyle matters the same way. If you are run down, under-slept, and scattered, it is hard to model or coach steady change. You feel the same decision fatigue your clients feel.
The real problem shows up when people try to stack “great training” on a poor lifestyle. You can give someone the smartest, most well-thought-out plan, but if they average 4.5 hours of broken sleep, drink little water, and eat decent food only half the time, their body will not respond the way you expect.
They are doing hard work in the gym and getting half the return, at best. That is a recipe for frustration.
Adaptation: Training Creates the Need, Lifestyle Allows It
Another powerful idea from Carl: training creates the need for adaptation, lifestyle supports the ability to actually adapt.
Think about what a well-written program does. It asks the body to do something a little harder, a little heavier, or a little longer. That stress creates a need to adapt.
Now picture this setup:
You design a periodized plan with clear mesocycles and microcycles.
You balance pushing and pulling, squatting and hinging.
You add thoughtful lunging in multiple planes.
On paper, it looks great. In real life, your client drinks almost no water, scrolls upsetting content in bed at midnight, wakes up multiple times a night, and eats inconsistent meals.
Their body is getting a clear signal from training, “We need to change.” Their lifestyle sends the opposite message, “Road closed, no adaptation available.”
In that situation, the right move is not to write a more advanced program. It is to fix the road.
Why Ignoring Lifestyle Fails Your Clients
When clients do not see results, they usually blame the program or their work ethic. Most have no idea how much lifestyle is holding them back, because nobody has explained it.
You never want a client frustrated and confused. If they are going to be frustrated, it should be because they know what would help and they are not yet doing it, not because they have no idea what is missing.
That is part of your job:
Ask about lifestyle, in real detail.
Do something with the information.
Connect it to their results in plain language.
If you ask how they sleep, eat, and live, then ignore their answers and only talk about split squats and interval work, you teach them that lifestyle is unimportant. You also make your own job harder.
Clients hire you for training, but their success depends on lifestyle. If their success depends on lifestyle, then your success as a coach does too. People do not stay with coaches when they do not get results.
From Action To Habit: The Real Goal Of Lifestyle Coaching
Most lifestyle advice stays at the “action” level. Go to bed earlier. Drink more water. Put your phone away. Helpful, but only if it sticks.
Long term, you want clients to move from action to habit. That means the behavior becomes so automatic that it barely feels like a choice, like brushing your teeth or taking a shower.
Decision fatigue is real. Your clients are already tired from work, family, and daily life. If every lifestyle behavior always feels like a new decision, they will eventually stop doing it.
So the goal with lifestyle coaching is simple:
Pick one clear action.
Support it until it becomes a habit.
Once it is automatic, pick a new action.
If you are still coaching the exact same lifestyle behavior three years later, something went wrong in that process.
Simple Lifestyle Actions That Matter
The mentorship highlighted a few simple but powerful habits you can work on with clients:
Consistent sleep and wake times: Going to bed around the same time and waking up around the same time gives the body a rhythm it can trust.
Hydration targets: A practical target is about half as many fluid ounces of water as their body weight in pounds across the day.
Phone habits before bed: Putting the phone away about an hour before bed can help. At the very least, avoid stimulating or upsetting content that keeps the brain wired.
These are not fancy. They are also not easy at first. Your job is to keep them simple, track them, and celebrate when they become automatic.
A Simple, Systematic Way To Coach Lifestyle
Lifestyle coaching does not have to be complicated. You can build a simple system that you repeat with every client.
Start at the base layer:
Know what your client wants. They should feel sure that you understand their goal and can help them get there. Without that trust, lifestyle conversations feel random or intrusive.
Once you are clear on the goal, look for the first lifestyle change that would support it. You are asking, “What is the lowest-hanging fruit?” or “What is most out of line right now?”
Maybe their food quality is solid, but their sleep is all over the place. In that case, do not start nitpicking their macros. Start with basic sleep hygiene, track it, and check in often.
The cycle looks like this:
Test or assess where they are now.
Coach one lifestyle action.
Retest or review.
Get feedback and reassess what to address next.
You are not trying to control their life. You are helping them get out of their own way so the training they are already doing can finally work.
If you want more structure around this, the OPEX Method Coaching Certificate Program goes much deeper into how to assess, program, and coach lifestyle in a repeatable way.
Consistency, Not Novelty, Creates Results
As coaches, we already know this for training. A random workout here and there does almost nothing. One perfect session does not change a body. It is the repetition over months and years that builds strength, muscle, speed, and endurance.
The same rule holds for lifestyle.
Clients love novelty. They ask about hacks, cleanses, short experiments, and quick challenges. They want a trick that skips the work of habit formation.
Your job is to remind them that:
A few basic habits, made automatic, beat any 30-day cleanse.
A consistent routine for sleep, food quality, and stress over time beats any short-term fix.
No single day of perfect behavior will make or break their future.
You can even tie it back to the gym. Just like 30 days of training is not enough to build real, lasting change, 30 days of “perfect” lifestyle will not solve everything either. It is what they can repeat that matters.
When lifestyle habits are steady, results compound. Training finally has something solid to stand on.
What This Means For Your Coaching Career
If clients hire you for training, but their results depend on lifestyle, then your career depends on how well you coach lifestyle.
You will not keep many clients who train hard, pay on time, and still do not see change. They will assume the program does not work, or that coaching does not help them. In reality, there is a gap between what they do in the gym and what they do outside of it.
Closing that gap is part of being a professional coach.
That might mean:
Building simple systems to ask, track, and revisit lifestyle habits.
Using tools like the free coaching guides from OPEX Fitness to sharpen how you talk about lifestyle.
Managing your own lifestyle so you can model the habits you coach.
If you coach online or in person and want software support, you can also explore the CoachRx software resources to help you program, track, and follow up on both training and lifestyle in one place.
Lifestyle coaching is not extra. It is the glue that holds the entire coaching relationship together.
Conclusion
When you zoom out, the message is clear: lifestyle is the foundation, training is the tool. Training creates the need for adaptation, but only lifestyle gives the body the ability to answer that call.
If you want better results for your clients, start by picking one lifestyle action that would change their training the most and coach it until it becomes a habit. Do the same for yourself.
Skip the hacks, focus on consistency, keep the conversations honest, and let simple habits compound. That is how you build fitter clients and a coaching career that actually lasts.
Next Steps
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