Help Your Clients Make Good Habits (And Ditch the Bad Ones)

As a fitness coach, you know that creating sustainable results isn't just about the right workouts or meal plans—it's about helping your clients make good habits that support those goals long-term. You know, so your clients can eventually graduate from working with you and do this health stuff themselves.

But here's the challenge: most clients come to you with years of stop-start cycles, relying on motivation or willpower to change. They're constantly asking questions like:

• "Why can't I stay consistent?"
• "Why do I fall off track so easily?"
• "How do I make healthy habits feel automatic?"

The truth is, building better habits isn't just about discipline. It's about understanding human psychology and using that knowledge to shape behavior intentionally.

In this post, I'll break down the science of how to make good habits, the common mistakes people make, and the coaching strategies you can use to help clients follow through, especially when life gets messy. Whether your clients are just getting started or struggling to maintain momentum, this framework will help you guide them more effectively and improve their long-term success.

The Science of Forming a New Habit

As a fitness coach, understanding how habits are formed—and why they stick—is key to helping your clients achieve long-term success. Whether you're working with someone who wants to build a consistent workout routine, eat more protein, or simply stop skipping meals, the process behind making good habits is rooted in behavioral psychology.

The Habit Loop

The widely accepted model for habit formation is the habit loop, first introduced by Charles Duhigg in The Power of Habit and grounded in neuroscience research. This loop includes three core elements:

1. Cue (or trigger):
   This is the prompt that tells the brain to initiate a behavior. Cues can be:
• Time-based (e.g., 7 a.m. = workout time)
• Location-based (e.g., seeing the gym bag by the door)
• Emotional (e.g., feeling stressed triggers snacking)
2. Routine (or behavior):
   This is the actual habit—what the person does in response to the cue. For example, running, logging a meal, or skipping a workout.
3. Reward:
   The benefit the brain gets from the behavior reinforces the habit as something they want to continue doing. This could be physical (endorphins from exercise), emotional (reduced anxiety), or social (praise or validation).

When a behavior is repeated enough in response to a cue and consistently produces a reward, it becomes more automatic—aka, a habit.

Neural Pathways

From a neuroscience perspective, every time a habit is repeated, neural pathways in the brain become stronger, like carving a trail through the woods. Over time, the brain requires less effort to activate these pathways, making the behavior feel more natural and less like a conscious decision.

This "automaticity" is what your clients are truly after when they say they want healthy living to become second nature.

Research in cognitive psychology suggests it takes on average 66 days to form a habit, though this varies based on the complexity of the behavior and the individual (Lally et al., 2010).

Why This Matters for Fitness Coaches

Most clients assume that habit change is just about discipline, but you and I both know that's not the full picture. Helping clients make good habits isn't about pushing harder; it's about designing smarter systems.

That includes:

• Identifying strong, consistent cues
• Choosing simple, repeatable behaviors
• Celebrating small wins to build positive reinforcement

When you use this habit framework in your coaching, you give your clients tools that are rooted in science, not just motivation (although having the right type of motivation is important here, too!). And when a client learns how habits form, they're more likely to stay consistent—even when willpower runs low.

Help Clients Start Making Good Habits

Let's first talk about helping clients add healthy habits to their lives. We'll get to how to break negative habits in a bit! 

If your client wants to form a good habit, they need to decrease friction. In other words, make this habit as easy as possible to do.

Friction refers to anything that adds effort, time, or decision-making to a behavior. And when friction is high, even the most well-intentioned clients struggle with follow-through.

As a coach, your job isn't just to tell clients what to do. It's to help them make those actions easier and more repeatable.

Why Reducing Friction Matters When Changing Habits

In behavior science, we know that the more effort a task requires, the less likely someone is to do it consistently, especially when motivation is low. This is where friction becomes a habit killer.

Even small barriers, like deciding what to eat post-workout, can derail follow-through. The brain defaults to what's easiest, and without structure, that usually means going back to old habits.

How You Can Help Clients Reduce Friction When Habit Building

There are a few ways you can support your clients in reducing friction when they want to create a new habit.

Start With the Right Environment

Help clients set up their physical space to support the habit:

• Encourage them to lay out workout clothes the night before
• Suggest meal prep strategies that keep high-protein options visible and accessible
• Recommend leaving a water bottle at their desk or in their car to increase hydration habits

Maybe they want to eat healthier, so they should try to make veggies and fruits easy to grab for snacks and meals (decrease the friction!).

They can move food around the house to keep healthy snacks at eye level in the pantry or the fridge, and move the other snacks to the top or bottom shelves to make them just a little bit more difficult to reach.

They'll most likely want to go with what's right in front of them, so this strategy will make it easier to make the healthier choice.

Have Them Automate Decisions

You probably know from experience that the fewer decisions a client has to make, the more likely they'll follow through:

• Provide template-based meal guides or a "go-to" list of protein-rich snacks (bonus points if you get the client to come up with this themselves based on foods they love)
• Encourage habit stacking (e.g., do 10 squats after brushing teeth) to build on existing routines

Say they want to get more steps in. Some easy things they can do are to pace the gym between their sets, park as far away from their destination as possible, and take calls as they walk in circles in the house.

These small adjustments can easily add a few thousand or more steps to a daily step count!

The easier it is for your client to do the thing they are trying to make a healthy habit, the more likely they are to do it long term. 

Every client will face unique points of friction. Your role is to help them identify and minimize those barriers so that their desired behaviors become more automatic. When clients experience fewer obstacles, the path to habit formation becomes smoother, and their consistency increases dramatically.

Break Bad Habits

Breaking bad habits is just as simple because you just have to do the exact opposite! If your client wants to break a bad habit, they need to increase friction or make the behavior difficult to do.

Think of friction as anything that adds resistance, inconvenience, or extra effort to a behavior. When you make a habit harder to do, it becomes less appealing, especially when clients are tired, stressed, or running on autopilot.

For example, if you want to stop constantly checking your phone, you should put it in a different room when you're working and turn off the phone app on your computer. Keeping your phone farther away means you have to put effort into checking it, which you likely won't want to do if you're in the middle of work. 

You can implement this same framework with your clients when trying to break bad habits.

The Psychology Behind Adding Friction

Unwanted habits often linger not because clients lack discipline, but because the behavior is too easy to do. Whether it's late-night snacking, skipping workouts, or endless scrolling instead of meal prepping, these behaviors are typically convenient and reward-driven.

Behavioral research shows that when we add even minor obstacles, like increasing the number of steps required to complete an action, we dramatically decrease the likelihood that the action will occur.

So, for example, maybe your client is having a hard time stopping at just ONE serving of chips and frequently finds themselves at the bottom of the bag (oops). Make it easy to eat just one serving! Have them take out one serving, close the bag, and put it on the top shelf of the pantry.

By portioning out the chips, they'll have enough to be satisfied, and the bag will be out of sight, so they won't be tempted to reach for more. 

You don't have to go overboard with making things difficult. Just make things a bit more challenging than the healthy habit changes I mentioned above.

Tips to Help Clients Add Friction to Bad Habits

You can help clients ditch undesirable habits while building habits that support their goals by doing the opposite of what I mentioned above.

Make Triggers Less Accessible

If your client always snacks in front of the TV, coach them to:

• Keep snacks out of sight or out of the house entirely
• Swap snacks into containers that require effort to open
• Move the TV remote to another room, so sitting down to watch TV requires intentionality

Add Steps That Disrupt the Habit Loop

Every additional step creates an opportunity for your client to pause and redirect:

• Suggest removing streaming apps from their phone to reduce screen time
• Recommend uninstalling food delivery apps or disabling one-click ordering

Use Inconvenience as a Tool to Create Better Habits

Coach clients to make their bad habits feel inconvenient:

• If they tend to skip workouts, encourage booking sessions in advance (cancellation feels like work)
• If they hit snooze, suggest moving their alarm across the room
• If they mindlessly scroll, help them create app blockers or switch their phone to grayscale

 Your clients don't need more willpower. They need better systems.

By adding small, intentional barriers to unhelpful behaviors, you shift the path of least resistance in their favor. The less accessible an unwanted habit is, the less power it holds.

As their coach, your job is to help them engineer their environment and routine so that success becomes the default, not the exception.

Get More Coaching Tools

Helping clients make good habits (and break the bad ones) goes far beyond surface-level strategies. It requires understanding the psychology behind behavior change.

If you want to feel more confident in coaching mindset and behavior with your clients, you'll love my 5 FREE mindset and behavior change lessons. These bite-sized trainings are packed with tools you can start using right away to help you retain clients longer, confidently help clients work through mindset barriers, and make your coaching more profitable.

Check out my original post here.

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Sources

Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.674