75 Hard has a simple, brutal pitch: five daily tasks, seventy-five days, zero flexibility. Miss any task, any day, and you start over from day one. Created by entrepreneur Andy Frisella in 2019, it's framed not as a fitness program but as a "mental toughness" challenge, and a few million attempts later it still floods social feeds every January and June.
Whether you should do it is genuinely debatable, and we'll get to that. But if you're doing it, sloppy tracking is the most common self-inflicted way to fail, so let's cover both the rules and the logistics.
The five daily rules
- Two 45-minute workouts. Every day. One of them must be outdoors, regardless of weather. They can't be combined into one 90-minute session.
- Follow a diet. Any structured diet of your choosing, with two hard add-ons: no alcohol and no cheat meals, for the full 75 days.
- Drink a gallon of water. That's 3.8 liters, roughly 16 glasses. Plain water; coffee and tea don't count toward it.
- Read 10 pages of nonfiction. A physical book or e-book you actually read. Audiobooks explicitly don't count under the original rules.
- Take a daily progress photo. The most forgotten task by a wide margin, and yes, forgetting it means restarting.
No rest days, no swaps, no "I'll double up tomorrow." The restart rule is the entire identity of the challenge.
Where people actually fail
Ask anyone who's restarted and it's rarely the workouts. The classic failure modes are administrative:
- The photo. It takes ten seconds and it's the thing people remember at 1am, in bed, on day 40.
- The water count. Nobody fails to drink water; people lose count of water. By evening, "was that glass eleven or thirteen?" is unanswerable without a tally.
- The outdoor workout on a bad-weather day. The rule has no weather exception, and people discover their real commitment level during the first cold rain.
- Defining the diet too vaguely. "Eat clean" isn't auditable, and on day 30 you'll have an argument with yourself about whether something counted as a cheat. Write the rules down before day one.
Notice the pattern: most failures are tracking failures, not effort failures.
How to track 75 Hard properly
A spreadsheet works until the gym, where it doesn't. Paper checklists work until you're traveling. The realistic setup is your phone, with each rule as its own habit so nothing hides inside a vague "did 75 Hard today" checkbox:
- Workout 1 and workout 2 as separate timer habits, 45 minutes each. A timer proves the duration instead of trusting your estimate. In init.Habits a timer habit logs the minutes toward the goal as the session runs.
- Water as a counter habit with a goal of 16 glasses (or track liters as a number habit with a 3.8L goal). Tap as you drink; the count argues with nobody.
- Reading as a number habit, goal of 10 pages.
- Diet and the progress photo as checkboxes, with the photo reminder pinned to a fixed evening time so it stops being the 1am surprise.
Put the whole set in a home screen widget and the day's status is visible at a glance, which matters in a challenge where one unlogged task is officially a failed day. The year-long heatmap gives you the satisfying version of what the spreadsheet never did.
One honest caveat: init.Habits has streak shields, which protect normal streaks from a missed day. Strict 75 Hard doesn't recognize that concept; the restart rule is the challenge. Track the habits, enjoy the heatmap, but the "start over" decision stays on your conscience, not the app's.
Should you even do it?
The challenge's defenders are right about one thing: 75 days of keeping five promises to yourself does change how you see your own follow-through. The structure is clear, the rules are auditable, and the all-or-nothing stakes genuinely motivate a certain kind of person.
The critics are right about the rest. Two-a-day workouts with no rest days for eleven weeks is a lot of load for a beginner, the no-exceptions design punishes life events (illness, injury, family emergencies) as if they were moral failures, and the restart rule is exactly the all-or-nothing trap that kills most habits. If you have any health concerns, a conversation with a doctor before day one is the boring, correct move.
There's a middle path with a name: 75 Soft. One 45-minute workout a day with one rest day a week, drink water to a sane target, read your 10 pages, no alcohol except social occasions. It keeps the structure and drops the masochism. Purists scoff at it, and purists also restart a lot.
After day 75
The quiet problem with 75 Hard: day 76. The challenge ends, the external structure vanishes, and a lot of finishers bounce straight back to baseline. The people who keep the results are the ones who convert the sprint into ordinary, sustainable habits: one workout, a reading habit, a reasonable water goal, tracked the normal way, with mercy for bad days built in. The challenge is the demo. The habits are the product.
FAQ
What are the 5 rules of 75 Hard?
Two 45-minute workouts (one outdoors), follow a diet with no alcohol or cheat meals, drink a gallon of water, read 10 pages of nonfiction, and take a progress photo. All five, every day, for 75 days. Missing any task restarts the challenge at day one.
What happens if I miss a day of 75 Hard?
Under the official rules you start over from day one, no matter whether you were on day 3 or day 73. That includes "soft" misses like forgetting the progress photo or finishing a few glasses short on water.
What's the best app to track 75 Hard?
Any tracker that supports timers, counters, and numeric goals alongside checkboxes, because the five tasks are different shapes. init.Habits handles all five modes, groups the tasks into a routine, and puts the day's checklist in a home screen widget so nothing slips at midnight.
What is 75 Soft?
The popular gentler variant: one daily 45-minute workout with one rest day per week, a sane water target, 10 pages of reading, and alcohol only socially. It keeps the daily structure while removing the restart rule and the two-a-day training load.