What is the Role of Trust in Fitness? – Quick and Dirty Tips

I want to talk about an important psychological aspect to fitness and its impact on outcomes. This will also hold true for anything you will do in your life that you are working towards in terms of reaching your fitness goals – or any goals. It’s important for business owners and educators. Literally everyone! It’s called trust. And the claim I am going to make is that low trust environments have low rates of investment. 

In a 1995 study (Meyers et.al) published their model of trust and how it impacts outcomes. Trust, when able to overcome risk perception, resulted in risk taking. Only risk taking can lead to an outcome. But, way back at the very opposite end of the journey towards an intended outcome, before trust, are three components that combine to form trust. If these are not in place, or if they change at any point before the outcome, then trust is broken and the model collapses. 

These three elements of trust are:

1. Perceived ability
2. Perceived integrity
3. Perceived benevolence

Let’s take these one by one and relate them to fitness or life in general. 

Ability

First up is perceived ability. You decide that you have been ignoring your doctor for too long. Your BMI is too high, your waist circumference is out of healthy ranges and your bloodwork is a mess. So you decide that you are going to hire a personal trainer. You go along to your first few sessions and it becomes clear that your trainer has a great love for Olympic Weightlifting. So, they are giving you a lot of positional work. Because you lack the mobility to get into positions and lacking the prerequisite strength, you are just working with a plastic pipe or broomstick. It’s fun and you feel like you are learning a new skill. But, after a month of doing this, although your positions are getting better, your bodyweight has not changed and neither has your waist circumference. You begin to think that weightlifting is not helping you reach your goals. You chat to the trainer and they are adamant that you need to stick with the program. Another month goes by and things have started to change, but its very marginal. You now start missing sessions, eventually you stop going altogether.

I will relate a personal story here also. In 2022, I was going to an adult gymnastics class. I wanted to improve my core strength, my balance and my upper body pulling capacity. I also wanted to learn new skills like aerials (hands free cartwheels) and handstand walking. I loved it. I could not have spoken more highly of this club. Until one day when a small group of cheerleaders joined. These were 4 young ladies, about 19 years of age and aside from perhaps having been attractive, they were also already pretty great at the gymnastics skills. The same day they appeared, I was there for 2 hours and the coach didn’t even speak to me once. He spent the whole class fawning over these girls. Which didn’t go unnoticed by me. The following week, I went and I had to help out an older lady, who was being ignored and yet again, I got no coaching in the 2 hours. Guess what happened the following week? I stayed at home and I never went back. Why? Perceived ability was broken.

If you begin to doubt that for whatever reason, be it knowledge or be it their application and attentiveness, that a coach or a business can not help you reach the intended outcome, then it’s over. 

Think about a training plan, many people jump from training plan to training plan. Why? They don’t see the results they want from the plan. No one sees results and then abandons what is going on. This is why deciding on and being clear about your goals is super important. If your course of action doesn’t meet the objective, then you wont ever stick to it because trust in the course of action will be broken before any objectives can be met.

Integrity

Next is perceived integrity. This one can be a little more difficult to understand, because its less objective for most people. Integrity is the belief that a business or person is operating under an ethical framework, doing what is ‘right’ and being honest. For some people, this might relate to last week’s episode, where one may choose to go to a gym or do business with a company that aligns with environmental values. I know a guy who runs a gym in Southern California and his gym account on Instagram and his own account are the same thing and he floods it with conspiracies and memes about Covid. This is interesting because on one hand, this may, for some, demonstrate great integrity, because he is unapologetically himself. But for others, who may not share those values and ideas, this would be a red flag for doing business. For me, if you are a science denier, I couldn’t trust you to use science to write me a program and understand how energy systems work. Or that in a pandemic, you would show any duty of care towards your members by following cleaning protocols.

Integrity, therefore can be more challenging to define, because ethics are more difficult. For some, they will follow utilitarianism, which is where what is ethical is what provides the most people with the most happiness, which contrasts with Kantian ethics, where what is good is what any reasonable person would say is good and doesn’t have any one person happiness attached to it. Also, the philosophy of ethics is very complex, so please dont take my two sentence description of ethics there as all there is to know about that. Basically choose a plan, a gym, a business owner that aligns with your moral compass and that shows consistency. If someone chops and changes all the time, perhaps they lack integrity and conviction. This would also break trust. Imagine one week my gym is telling you HIIT training is life and the next, I’m all about sustainable aerobic work. Trust is broken. 

Benevolence

Finally is perceived benevolence. Does this person, this gym owner, this coach or this organization care about me above and beyond the fact I pay them? They show care and they show concern.

When I moved to a new city, I joined a new judo club. I ended up just getting a freak injury. I mean, if you do judo or wrestling you’ll know that injuries are kind par for the course, but anyway, I ended up in hospital, getting an MRI and had my right arm in a sling for weeks. Even now, over 18 months later, I am still having minor issues.

Anyway, after I was injured in the class, guess what? Not a single person ever reached out to me. The coaches, the owner, no one. So, I paid money to go train, I was injured by someone in the class, ended up in hospital and no one called or emailed me to check how I was. Back to the gymnastic class example: guess what happened when I was able to train again? Yup…it was not that gym I went to train in. Why would I go train with anyone that never misses taking a payment out my bank account, but when I nearly get my arm ripped out the socket, its radio silence on their end? Benevolence was missing, trust was broken and therefore I never went back. 

What builds trust?

Successful outcomes (both for clients and for businesses) depend on trust being maintained long enough for initial risk (time, monetary investment) to be overcome and the end goal to be met. If at any point on the road towards the intended outcome, trust is broken either by a lack of ability, a lack of integrity or a lack of benevolence, then you will be unlikely to meet the end goal. 

Check out the Get-Fit Guy podcast for more of my thoughts on functional fitness and beyond. If you have any questions or would like to just say ‘hi’, please email me on getfitguy@quickanddirtytips.com.