A 75 Hard checklist is five lines long, which is exactly why people underestimate it. The tasks are simple to write down and brutal to repeat — and the part that ends most attempts isn't a missing gym session, it's an ambiguous evening in week six where you genuinely can't remember whether you drank the full gallon. This is the checklist, plus the rulings on every edge case that comes up once you're actually in it.
For the programme's origin and the reasoning behind the rules, 75 Hard rules and how to track it covers that ground. If you're still deciding whether to do the full version, 75 Hard vs 75 Soft and 75 Hard vs 75 Medium compare the three. This post assumes you've decided, and is about running it cleanly.
The daily 75 Hard checklist
Five tasks, every day, for 75 consecutive days. Miss any one of them and the official rule from Andy Frisella's own page is that you restart at day one.
| # | Task | The detail that trips people up |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Two 45-minute workouts | They must be separated by at least 3 hours, and one has to be outdoors — in whatever weather turns up |
| 2 | Follow a diet | Any diet you choose, but no cheat meals and no alcohol at all for 75 days |
| 3 | Drink 1 gallon of water | 3.8 litres. Not "roughly a gallon" |
| 4 | Read 10 pages | Non-fiction, aimed at self-improvement. Audiobooks don't count |
| 5 | Take a progress photo | Every day, no exceptions, even on the days you'd rather not |
That's the whole programme. There's no rest day built in, no allowance for illness, no travel exemption. The design is deliberately unforgiving — the point is the streak of 75, not any individual day's training effect.
What counts and what doesn't
These are the questions that surface around week three, when the novelty's gone and you start looking for the edges.
| Question | Ruling |
|---|---|
| Do walks count as a workout? | Yes — a 45-minute walk is a valid workout, including the outdoor one |
| Can the outdoor workout be under cover? | It has to be genuinely outdoors. A garage or a covered gym doesn't count |
| Can I drink coffee? | Yes. Coffee isn't restricted, though it doesn't count toward the gallon |
| Does sparkling or flavoured water count? | Plain water is the intent; unsweetened sparkling water is generally accepted, anything with sugar isn't |
| Can I split the two workouts into three shorter ones? | No — two sessions of 45 minutes each, three hours apart |
| Is one glass of wine at a wedding okay? | No. Zero alcohol is one of the few absolutely rigid rules |
| Do audiobooks or podcasts count for the reading? | No. Ten physical pages of a non-fiction book |
| Can I read the same ten pages twice? | Technically yes, and it defeats the purpose entirely |
| What if I'm ill? | The programme has no illness clause. Most people take the sensible medical decision and restart afterwards |
| What if I forget the photo? | It's a failed day under the official rules, which is why the photo is worth automating first |
The last row is worth sitting with, because it's where most restarts actually come from. Nobody fails 75 Hard on the second workout. They fail it on the water at 11pm or on a photo they forgot to take, and those are both admin problems rather than fitness problems.
Whether the whole thing is a good idea is a separate question — Cleveland Clinic's write-up is a fair summary of the criticism, and the "no rest day, no adaptation" objection is a real one. Worth reading before day one rather than day fifty.
How to run the checklist without losing your place
- Set up all five as separate daily items before day one. Not one "75 Hard" checkbox — five. On a bad day you'll complete three of them, and a single combined box hides that entirely, which makes it much easier to talk yourself into a restart you didn't need.
- Give the water a counter, not a checkbox. A gallon is roughly eight pints, and the only reliable way to hit it is to know at 3pm whether you're at four or at two. A tick you fill in at bedtime tells you nothing while there's still time to act.
- Time the workouts rather than estimating them. Forty-five minutes is longer than it feels once you're bored, and "about 45" drifts downward by week four. Start a timer, let it run.
- Pin the outdoor session to a fixed time. It's the task most likely to get postponed into darkness and then skipped. Decide the hour now, not each morning.
- Photograph at the same moment daily. Attach it to something that already happens without fail — right after the shower, before the first coffee. A photo attached to a fixed cue survives; a photo attached to "sometime today" doesn't.
- Check the day's five before you go to bed, not the next morning. The whole programme runs on consecutive days, so a gap discovered the following day is a gap you can't close.
None of this makes the workouts easier. It removes the failure mode that has nothing to do with effort — the day you technically did everything and lost the streak to bookkeeping.
The two weeks that decide it
Days one to five are easy in the way that any new thing is easy. Days 35 to 50 are where attempts actually die, and they die for an unglamorous reason: something ordinary happens — a work trip, a delayed flight, a stomach bug, a wedding — and the programme has no mechanism for it.
You can't build slack into 75 Hard without doing a different challenge. What you can do is decide in advance how you'll handle the three or four disruptions you can already see on the calendar. Which hotel has a gym, when the outdoor 45 minutes happens on the day you travel, what you're eating at the wedding, where the tenth page gets read on a day that starts at 5am. Those decisions take ten minutes to make now and are almost impossible to make well at the time.
And if you do restart, restart. A restart isn't a failure of character — it's the programme working exactly as designed. The number of people who complete it on their second or third attempt is far higher than the number who nail it first time, and the days you did complete weren't wasted. If a full reset feels like too blunt an instrument for the way you actually live, 75 Hard vs 75 Soft covers the version that allows for it.
FAQ
What are the five 75 Hard tasks?
Two 45-minute workouts at least three hours apart with one outdoors, a diet of your choosing with no cheat meals and no alcohol, one gallon of water, ten pages of non-fiction, and a daily progress photo. All five, every day, for 75 consecutive days.
Do walks count for 75 Hard?
Yes. A 45-minute walk is a legitimate workout under the rules, and it can be the outdoor session. It has to be a continuous 45 minutes, though — a walk to the shop and back later in the day doesn't add up to one.
Can you drink coffee on 75 Hard?
Yes, coffee is allowed and isn't restricted by the programme. It doesn't count toward the gallon of water, and if you're adding sugar or syrups you'll need to square that with whichever diet you've chosen.
What happens if you miss a day of 75 Hard?
You restart at day one. That's the rule as written, and it applies whether you missed all five tasks or forgot a single progress photo. Because the penalty is so absolute, most people find it worth tracking the five items separately in something like init.Habits — so a day that's genuinely complete never gets lost to a missed log.