The original rules
Stephen Gallagher, a trainer in Ireland who posts as @stephengfitness, put 75 Soft on TikTok in April 2021 as an answer to a specific complaint: 75 Hard asks for two 45-minute workouts a day, and most people do not have that. His framing was blunt — it is 75 Hard for people who do not have time for 75 Hard.
| Daily rule | What it means |
|---|---|
| Eat well | Nutritious food most of the time. Alcohol only on social occasions. |
| Move 45 minutes | Any intentional training. One day a week is active recovery — walking, yoga, stretching. |
| 3 litres of water | A fixed daily target, lower than 75 Hard's gallon. |
| Read 10 pages | Any book. Fiction counts. |
Four rules, no restart clause, no photo requirement. That is the whole original challenge.
The variant you will also see
A second rule set circulates widely under the same name, including in mainstream health coverage. It asks for 30 minutes of exercise four times a week, five minutes of daily meditation, progress pictures on day one and day 75, and either ten pages of reading or ten minutes of self-improvement audio — alongside the same three litres of water and roughly 90 percent healthy eating.
Neither version is wrong. There is no 75 Soft rulebook to appeal to. What matters is that you write down which version you are doing before day one, because the temptation on day 40 is to quietly adopt whichever rule is easier that day.
What 75 Soft is actually good at
The design choice that makes 75 Soft work is the missing restart rule. On 75 Hard, one missed task erases 40 days of work, so a single bad Tuesday ends the attempt entirely. 75 Soft treats a miss as a miss: you log it and carry on tomorrow.
That sounds softer, and it is — but it changes what the challenge trains. 75 Hard trains holding an absolute line. 75 Soft trains returning after a break, which is the skill that actually determines whether you are still exercising next year.
An eleven-week frame, not a diet
Seventy-five days is long enough for the season to change, for one holiday and probably one illness. Plan for that rather than being surprised by it:
- Pick the recovery day in advance and make it the busiest day of your week — that is the day a 45-minute session is most likely to be skipped anyway.
- Set the movement floor low enough to survive a bad day. A 45-minute walk in the rain still counts, and counting it is the entire point.
- Decide what “eating well” means now, in writing, while you are calm. A rule you define on day 50 is a rule you have already bent.
Who should not do this
75 Soft is the gentlest of the three, but it is still a daily-rules challenge with a fixed water target and a scoring mindset. If you are pregnant, managing a heart or kidney condition, or have any history of disordered eating, talk to a doctor or a professional first — structured challenges with daily compliance targets can be a genuinely bad frame for some people, however moderate the rules look.