What each version asks for
| Version | Sessions | Rest days | Outdoors |
|---|---|---|---|
| 75 Hard | 2 × 45 min, separated by a gap | None | One session, every day |
| 75 Soft | 1 × 45 min | One active recovery day a week | Not required |
| 75 Medium | 1 × 45 min | None | Optional |
What counts as a workout
All three versions are deliberately unfussy here. Intentional, continuous movement for the full duration counts — weights, running, cycling, swimming, a class, yoga, or a brisk walk. What does not count is time spent in a gym rather than training: warming up, resting between sets for ten minutes, or a walk that is really a commute with your phone out.
Walking is not a loophole. On 75 Hard it is the most common outdoor session precisely because it is repeatable in bad weather and adds almost nothing to recovery debt — which is what makes doing two sessions a day for 75 days survivable at all.
The outdoor rule
75 Hard requires one of the two sessions to be outdoors regardless of weather. Rain, snow, wind, heat — the rule does not carve out exceptions, and that is the intent. The program describes itself as a mental toughness program rather than a training plan, and the outdoor session is the clearest expression of that: it removes the comfortable option on the day you least want to go.
The one exception worth making. Weather that is genuinely unsafe — lightning, ice you will fall on, extreme heat — is not the discomfort the rule is aiming at. Nobody has ever built mental toughness by getting hypothermia. Adjust and be honest that you adjusted.
Why the two sessions must be separate
A 90-minute block would be easier and, from a training perspective, roughly equivalent. The rule asks for two sessions because the thing being trained is the decision to start — twice a day, for 75 days. Merging them removes the second decision, which is the harder one and therefore the point.
In practice most people put the first session early, before the day can take it, and the second in the evening. The gap only needs to be a real gap; there is no specified minimum in the commonly published rules.
Surviving 75 days with no rest days
This is the part that ends attempts, and it ends them physically rather than mentally. Two daily sessions with zero programmed recovery is more training volume than most people have ever done, arriving all at once.
- Make one session genuinely easy. If both sessions are hard training, you are not doing a 75-day challenge — you are scheduling an injury for around week three. A 45-minute walk is a complete session.
- Alternate what you load. Legs, then upper body, then something low-impact. Running twice a day for 75 days is how shins and knees fail.
- Treat sleep as part of the program even though no version lists it. Two workouts a day on six hours of sleep does not compound — it accumulates damage.
- Watch for the real signals: a resting heart rate drifting up, sleep getting worse, strength dropping, joints aching in the morning. Those are overtraining signs, not weakness, and pushing through them is how people finish 75 days injured.
Illness and injury
No version of these challenges is a medical protocol, and the restart clause is not a doctor's instruction. Training through a fever, a chest infection or a real injury is not discipline; it is how a fixable problem becomes a long one. Stop, recover, and either resume or rewrite your own end date. Anyone who tells you that makes the challenge not count has confused a rule set from the internet with something that matters.