The three versions at a glance
| Rule | 75 Hard | 75 Soft | 75 Medium |
|---|---|---|---|
| Workouts | 2 × 45 min, one outdoors | 1 × 45 min, one recovery day a week | 1 × 45 min, no rest days |
| Water | 1 US gallon (3.8 L) | 3 litres | Half your bodyweight in oz |
| Diet | Any structured diet, followed exactly | Roughly 90% healthy eating | Your plan, on 90% of days |
| Alcohol | None for 75 days | Social occasions only | Usually limited, not banned |
| Reading | 10 pages non-fiction, physical book | 10 pages, any book | 10 pages, any book |
| Photo | Every day | Day 1 and day 75 (common variant) | Every day |
| If you slip | Restart at day one | Keep going | Keep going, hold 90% |
| Author | Andy Frisella | Stephen Gallagher, April 2021 | No single author |
Which one to pick
The honest filter is not how disciplined you are — it is what your next eleven weeks look like. Open a calendar and find the trips, weddings, deadlines and birthdays that fall inside the window, then choose the version whose rules survive them.
- Already training most days, and you want the discomfort? 75 Hard. It is designed as a mental toughness program, and the restart rule is the whole point rather than a flaw.
- Starting from a quiet few months, or coming back after a break? 75 Soft. One session a day with a weekly recovery day is a jump you can absorb.
- Training already, but your calendar has landmines? 75 Medium. The 90 percent target tolerates the days life wins.
The failure mode nobody warns you about. Most people do not fail a 75-day challenge on willpower — they fail it on arithmetic. Two 45-minute workouts, a gallon of water and ten pages is roughly two hours a day, every day, for two and a half months. If those two hours do not exist in your week right now, the version that fits is the one you will still be doing in October.
Where the published rules disagree
None of these challenges has a governing body, so “the rules” means “the rules as most commonly published”. That matters more than it sounds, because the versions have genuinely drifted:
- 75 Soft has at least two rule sets in circulation. The original posted by Stephen Gallagher asks for 45 minutes of movement daily, three litres of water and ten pages of any book. A widely reprinted variant instead specifies 30 minutes four times a week, adds five minutes of meditation and cuts the daily photo to day one and day 75. Both get called 75 Soft.
- 75 Hard's fine print varies by retelling. Whether e-books count, and whether coffee counts toward the gallon, are read differently by different sources — while the core rules stay remarkably stable.
- 75 Medium has no original at all. It stabilised through repetition, so every published version is one interpretation.
On each page we say which version we are describing and where it came from, rather than presenting one retelling as canon.
The seasonal one: the Winter Arc
From October the 75s get a rival. The Winter Arc runs from 1 October to New Year — roughly 90 days — and inverts the format: instead of five rules someone wrote for you, you write three to five of your own and hold them while the year winds down, entering January ahead instead of starting there. No restart clause, no owner, a different bet entirely — the comparison is in Winter Arc vs 75 Hard, and there is a neat trick for running both: 75 Hard started on 18 October finishes exactly on New Year's Eve.
How these pages are sourced
75 Hard rules are reported as published by the program itself, which describes it as a mental toughness program and not a fitness challenge. 75 Soft is attributed to its creator with the date it appeared. Where a rule is contested, we say so instead of picking the version that makes a neater table. Glow75's own Home Edition plans are adaptations, and they are labelled as adaptations wherever they appear.
These are not medical guidelines. Both of the demanding versions involve daily training with no rest days and a fixed water target, and neither was designed around your health history — the footer disclaimer on every page is there for a reason.