The rules as usually published
75 Medium exists because the gap between the other two is enormous. 75 Hard asks for two workouts a day and restarts you for a single miss; 75 Soft asks for one session with a weekly recovery day and never restarts you at all. 75 Medium fills the middle — one daily workout, no rest days, and a tolerance built into the scoring rather than bolted on as an excuse.
| Daily rule | The common version |
|---|---|
| Workout | One 45-minute session every day, no rest days. Outdoor training optional. |
| Water | Half your bodyweight in ounces — at 150 lb that is 75 oz, roughly 2.2 litres. |
| Nutrition | Your own plan, followed on at least 90 percent of the days. |
| Reading | 10 pages a day, any book. |
| Photo | Daily progress photo. |
| Scoring | Six tasks a day, all six completed on at least 68 of the 75 days. |
Nobody owns this one
75 Hard has an author and 75 Soft has a creator with a date. 75 Medium has neither. It emerged from people publishing their own middle version of 75 Hard, and the rule set settled through repetition — which means every version you find, including this one, is an interpretation rather than a source.
Practical consequence. Because there is no canonical version, arguing about whether something “counts” on 75 Medium is meaningless. Write your six tasks down before day one, define what completing each one looks like, and that document is your rulebook for the next eleven weeks.
The 90 percent rule is the interesting part
Completing all six tasks on 68 of 75 days gives you roughly seven imperfect days — about one every eleven days. That is not a loophole; it is a design that matches how eleven weeks actually go. One illness, one trip, one day that collapses under work is already three of your seven.
It also removes the psychological trap of all-or-nothing rules. On 75 Hard, day 44 going wrong deletes 43 days of work, and the rational response for many people is to quit entirely rather than restart. On 75 Medium a bad day costs you one of seven tokens, so the sensible move is always to keep going — which is exactly the behaviour you want to be training.
Making it countable
The weakness of a percentage rule is that it is easy to fudge in your head. Two things fix that:
- Score the day, not the week. Six boxes, ticked or not, before you sleep. A day is complete or it is not — no half credit, because half credit is how 68 quietly becomes 55.
- Track the misses, not the hits. You have seven. Writing down which ones you have spent, and why, is more useful than a wall of green ticks — and by day 30 the pattern in those misses tells you exactly which rule you chose badly.
Who it suits
75 Medium fits people who already train and want more structure than 75 Soft, but whose next eleven weeks contain events that 75 Hard's absolutes would destroy. If you are not training regularly yet, the no-rest-days rule is a bigger commitment than it looks — 75 Soft's weekly recovery day exists for good physiological reasons, and skipping it is how a promising eleven weeks ends in week three with a sore knee.