75 Hard workouts are two 45-minute sessions a day, every day, for 75 days, and one of them has to be outdoors regardless of weather. There is no rest day, no combining the two into one 90-minute block, and no swapping the outdoor session for a treadmill because it's raining. That's the entire specification, and almost every restart traces back to the scheduling rather than the training.
The other daily tasks live in 75 Hard rules and how to track it; the food side is in 75 Hard diet rules. This post is the workout half: what counts, where the second session actually goes, and how to keep the outdoor one from becoming the reason you quit in week three.
What counts as a workout
More than people assume. The programme specifies duration, not intensity — 45 minutes of deliberate physical activity, twice, at least three hours apart.
| Activity | Counts | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Gym session, lifting | Yes | The obvious one, and the least likely to be the problem |
| A 45-minute walk | Yes | Fully legal, and the correct answer for the second session most days |
| Yoga, mobility, stretching | Yes | Counts as one of the two, indoor or outdoor |
| Cycling, swimming, rowing | Yes | Swimming can't be the outdoor one unless the water is |
| Sport, a football match | Yes | If it's 45 minutes of actual play |
| Housework, gardening, dog walking | Grey | Only if you'd honestly call it a workout; most people wouldn't |
| Two sessions back to back | No | They must be separated by at least three hours |
| A 90-minute single session | No | Duration isn't the point; showing up twice is |
The three-hour gap is the rule people try hardest to negotiate away, and it's the one doing most of the work. Two separated sessions mean the day has two moments where you have to choose to go, which is the actual test.
Why one session has to be outdoors
Because the weather is the only variable the programme can't let you control. An indoor plan is a plan that works when conditions are convenient; the outdoor clause removes that escape. The official 75 Hard page is blunt about it — the outdoor workout happens in rain, snow, wind and dark, and the point is precisely that it's unpleasant.
Practically, the outdoor session should be the walk, not the hard training. A 45-minute walk in bad weather is achievable on your worst day; an outdoor run in February at 9pm after a 12-hour shift is how people end up restarting. Put the ambition indoors where the conditions are stable, and put the guaranteed one outside.
Fit two sessions into an ordinary weekday
- Anchor the outdoor walk to something that already happens. Straight after work, or immediately after the school run. Anchored sessions survive; sessions scheduled for "the evening" get eaten by the evening.
- Put the harder session in the morning. Not because mornings are magic, but because nothing else in the day can displace them. A morning workout routine goes into the templates by time available.
- Check the three-hour gap on paper, once. Pick your two times and verify the separation. Sorting this out on day one prevents 74 small negotiations.
- Pre-decide the bad-weather version. Waterproof, head torch, same route. The decision to be made when it's dark and wet is "which coat", not "whether".
- Have a travel plan. Airport walking laps and a hotel-room bodyweight circuit both count. A trip with no plan is the most common cause of a day-40 restart.
Two 45-minute blocks is 90 minutes a day, 10.5 hours a week. That's the number to be honest about before you start — WHO's physical activity guidance puts a solid weekly baseline at 150 minutes, so 75 Hard is asking for roughly four times it, every week, without a rest day. It's a discipline exercise, not a training programme, and treating it as the latter is how injuries happen.
The mistakes that cause restarts
Making both sessions hard. Two demanding workouts a day for 75 days accumulates fatigue faster than most people expect. One quality session and one easy session is the version that finishes.
Leaving the second session unscheduled. "I'll fit it in later" reliably means 9:40pm, in the dark, deciding whether tomorrow's an option. It isn't.
Treating the walk as not counting. It counts. Under-rating the easy session is why people skip it and then restart over something that would have taken 45 unhurried minutes.
No plan for illness. The programme has no sick-day clause. Decide now what you'll do about a heavy cold, because you'll be deciding it while ill otherwise. Training through a fever to protect a streak is a bad trade in every direction.
Keeping the record honest
Two workouts a day for 75 days is 150 sessions, and the thing that goes wrong isn't forgetting to train — it's losing track of which of today's two you've done. By week four, the days blur.
So log each session separately, not as a combined daily tick. Two boxes, one for the indoor session and one for the outdoor one, is the difference between knowing where you are at 6pm and guessing.
After day 75
The two-a-day structure isn't meant to continue, and most people who finish drop straight to zero, which wastes the 75 days. The useful move is to decide the maintenance version before you finish: one session a day, or five a week, with the walk kept as the floor.
Workout habit tracker covers setting that up so the training survives without a challenge attached to it, and how to be consistent with habits is the general version of the same problem.
FAQ
Do walks count for 75 Hard workouts?
Yes. A 45-minute walk is a legitimate workout under the rules, and it's the best choice for the outdoor session because it's achievable in bad weather and on bad days. Most people who finish use a walk as one of their two.
Can you do both 75 Hard workouts back to back?
No. The two sessions have to be at least three hours apart. Combining them into one 90-minute block breaks the rule, because the point is showing up twice in a day rather than accumulating minutes.
What happens if it rains during the outdoor workout?
You do it anyway. The outdoor clause exists specifically so weather isn't a valid reason, which is why the sensible outdoor session is a walk with a waterproof rather than something conditions can ruin.
How do you track two workouts a day for 75 days?
Log them as two separate habits, not one daily tick, so that at any point in the day you can see which one is still outstanding. Timer-based habits in a tracker like init.Habits record the real minutes, so the 150-session total at the end is measured rather than remembered.