Cut through the confusion with Active IQ’s Trust Your Trainer campaign

There has never been more fitness information available and yet there has never been more confusion, says Robyn Drummond, as she shares details of Active IQ’s Trust Your Trainer campaign

We are living in a time where exercise, nutrition and wellbeing advice is being consumed so quickly at the swipe of a finger, from ‘what I eat in a day’ videos to products being sold, and the ability to share information with the only metric being that the person has high ‘followers’ not qualifications. The problem isn’t that people want to improve their health. People have never been more health curious, which is amazing. But the problem is who they are learning this from, and this is why I’m proud to be supporting Active IQ’s Trust Your Trainer campaign because this is now a public health issue and we need change.

The two most common reasons people seek help in health and fitness are:

• weight management
• mental wellbeing support.

Yet the content taking over social media is often making both of these worse. People are selling products or putting out this information in high doses to make commission but at what cost? The cost of confusion in others. Young people are growing up feeling like they’re not enough. Then there’s the person who’s tried to make a healthy change for the tenth time and just hasn’t got a clue anymore.

Conflicting, inaccurate and unregulated advice is creating more guilt, more fear and more confusion. People are being told to cut out food groups, exercise excessively, chase a certain body type and follow rigid rules that ignore current lifestyle, individual needs, current mental wellbeing and medical background.

A large following has become mistaken for credibility and it shouldn’t be, unless the individual is qualified to do so, especially when they have influence over so many people in their audience.

It’s personal

This situation is so important to me because I know how dangerous this space can be. I was actually that person, influenced as a young person, comparing myself to other women, wishing I could just look like them. Picking my body apart, I was looking for ways to change this over and over. At 18, I had just qualified as a gym instructor. Due to external situations, I didn’t feel confident as it was and I generally had low self-esteem, so at the time I was quite naive. I didn’t think I ‘looked like a PT’, so I started following bikini bodybuilding models on social media and convinced myself that, if I looked like them, I’d be successful because they had thousands of followers.

Over those four years, I worked with people who I followed online because of what they posted, but they pushed extremely restrictive dieting and excessive exercise. At this point, all I really wanted was to feel more confident, healthier and just feel better in myself, but this process did the complete opposite for me.

I became very unwell. I developed an eating disorder. I was scared of normal meals. Food made me horrendously anxious and, while I would say I have recovered from this now, there are still times 10 years later that this creeps in. And the hardest part? No one stepped in. No one identified that something was seriously wrong. I was just left to deal with it.

That experience is one of the biggest reasons I do the work I do now. I’ve rebuilt my relationship with food, health and movement, and now my mission is to help others avoid falling into the same trap.

What worries me most is that the environment that harmed me has only gotten even bigger:

• More extreme diet trends going viral overnight
• ‘Hacks’ with zero scientific backing
• ‘What I eat in a day’ videos influencing people to eat almost nothing
• Exercise messages that still promote spot reduction
• Local groups marketing themselves as ‘nutrition groups’ while operating deceptively and selling products
• Coaching that sells fast fat loss

This content continues to target people who are already vulnerable and who feel uncomfortable in their bodies and are desperate for change – desperate just to feel good. And, when you feel like that, you are more likely to believe what you see.

This is why the Trust Your Trainer campaign is so essential. Being qualified and accredited matters because it represents:

• Education grounded in evidence
• An understanding of safety and risk
• Professional boundaries
• Duty of care.

Health and fitness professionals influence behaviour, mindset, self-image and health outcomes. That responsibility should never sit in the hands of someone whose only ‘credential’ is popularity.

“At FitPro, we believe trust is everything. As an industry, we owe people better than guesswork and clickbait. That’s why we proudly support Trust Your Trainer – a vital step in raising standards, protecting consumers, and championing qualified, credible voices in an increasingly noisy online fitness space. We’d encourage everyone across the industry to get behind this initiative and add their name to the call for change.”
Teresa Wheatley, Executive Director, FitPro

Stand out the right way

Here is how we as fitness professionals can stand out the right way – and it’s important we do stand up for what is right.

1. Educate – Your job is to make people feel capable of making change but be confident in your knowledge when you share it. It will connect you with others.
2. Show your qualifications PROUDLY – Share what qualifications you have done. Talk about how your learning has shaped your career and how you can help people with that. For example, I completed a course recently and talking about it online sets me apart, builds trust and makes people want to work with me.
3. Promote sustainability over extreme methods – We want our clients to get the best results, of course, but please support clients to do this the ‘long way’. Fast results often harm clients in the long run. The longest way is actually the quickest way because it builds long-term change.
4. Speak up – We all need to come together to speak up. Silence allows harmful trends and messages to spread. You don’t need to attack or rudely call anyone out, but you can challenge myths and back it up with evidence-driven information.
5. Don’t forget your influence – Your clients aren’t just copying your workouts. What you teach them will stick with them. They trust you, so let’s help them with the right knowledge to equip them with confidence and autonomy.

Trust Your Trainer is calling for higher standards and a return to integrity in an industry that has become increasingly unregulated online.

People deserve:

• Accurate information
• Support that protects their mental health
• Guidance rooted in care, not clicks
• Professionals who are qualified to help them.

We can’t control everything shared online but we can raise the bar for what this industry represents, so please get behind us to support Active IQ’s Trust Your Trainer campaign.

If you’d like to know what do if you suspect your client has an eating disorder, head over to Dr Linia Patel’s post on the FitPro blog.

Robyn Drummond is a Personal Trainer, nutrition coach, Active IQ ambassador and runs her online health and wellbeing platform supporting people to build strength, confidence, and sustainable habits that actually fit real life. Alongside her online programme, Robyn delivers workshops and educational sessions in schools and community settings, covering topics such as body image, confidence, nutrition education, menopause, and mental wellbeing. She is passionate about helping people feel capable in their bodies, confident in their choices, and supported in building a lifestyle that works for them, not against them.