75 Medium Challenge: Rules, Free PDF Tracker & Program Builder

Disclaimer: Consult with your doctor before you start this or any similar program. I am not a doctor or a dietician. I did not create the 75 soft, medium or hard challenge. I created a planner for those who want to use this system to track their process. Any recommendations I may make about weight loss, nutrition, lifestyle, fitness, or information provided to you on this website should be discussed between you and your doctor. The information you receive on this site, in our emails, challenges, and courses do not take the place of professional medical advice.

The 75 medium challenge is a 75-day mental toughness and fitness program that sits exactly where its name suggests: harder than 75 Soft challenge, kinder than 75 Hard challenge. When I first looked into it, every page I found told me the rules and then left me alone with a blank calendar, so I built the free program builder on this page instead. It walks you through six quick decisions, calculates your personal water goal from your body weight, and generates a printable 75 medium challenge PDF with your real dates, your workout schedule, and your rules on it. No app, no email address, no catch.

Below you will find the complete 75 medium challenge rules, how the challenge compares to 75 Hard and 75 Soft, a realistic diet and workout plan, and everything I learned about actually finishing all 75 days rather than quitting quietly around day 20 like most people do.

What Is the 75 Medium Challenge?

The 75 medium challenge is an unofficial, community-created adaptation of the original 75 Hard program. 75 Hard demands two daily workouts, a perfectly strict diet, a gallon of water, and a full restart if you miss anything, which is exactly why so many people never attempt it or abandon it in week two. The 75 day medium challenge keeps the structure and the daily accountability but softens the sharpest edges: one workout instead of two, a diet you follow 90% of the time instead of 100%, and water scaled to your body instead of a flat gallon.

The result is a program that still asks a lot of you, every single day, for 75 consecutive days, but that a working parent, a beginner, or anyone with an actual life can realistically complete. In my experience that matters more than intensity, because a challenge you finish changes you and a challenge you quit just confirms the story you already tell yourself. There is real science behind the length, too: habit research consistently finds that daily behaviors take roughly two to three months of repetition to become automatic, and 75 days lands right in that window.

75 Medium Challenge Rules

There is no single official rulebook, since the challenge grew out of the community rather than from one creator, but the version below is the most widely followed set of 75 medium rules, and it is the version my program builder uses as its starting point. You complete all six tasks every day for 75 days.

Rule 1: Follow a diet of your choice, 90% of the time, with no alcohol

Pick any structured way of eating: Mediterranean, high protein with a calorie target, low carb, vegetarian, whole foods with no ultra-processed food, intermittent fasting, or your own plan. Then follow it 90% of the time. In practice that means either one planned cheat meal a week or a small daily allowance of roughly 10% of your calories. The 90% figure is not a loophole; it is the feature that makes the diet survivable for 75 days, and it happens to match how dietitians actually recommend people eat. Alcohol is out completely for the full 75 days in the standard rules.

Rule 2: One 45-minute workout every day, no rest days

This is half the exercise load of 75 Hard, and unlike 75 Hard there is no requirement that a workout happens outdoors, though I recommend getting outside a couple of times a week anyway. Any intentional movement counts: strength training, running, cycling, swimming, a brisk walk, yoga, pilates, a sports class, or a genuine active recovery session. The rule is daily consistency, not daily intensity, and the people who finish are almost always the ones who alternate hard days with honestly easy ones.

Rule 3: Drink half your body weight in ounces of water

Instead of the flat one-gallon rule from 75 Hard, the 75 medium challenge scales water to your body: take your weight in pounds, divide by two, and drink that many fluid ounces daily. A 160-pound person drinks 80 oz, which is about 2.4 liters or ten cups. This is both safer for smaller people, since forcing a gallon into a small body every day is genuinely unpleasant and unnecessary, and more demanding for larger people, which is fair. My program builder does this calculation for you, in pounds or kilograms, and prints your exact goal on your tracker along with how many standard water bottles it works out to.

Rule 4: Ten minutes of personal development content daily

75 Hard requires ten pages of a physical nonfiction book. The medium version is more flexible: ten minutes a day of anything that develops you, whether that is a physical book, an audiobook, or a podcast about health, money, mindset, relationships, or skills. The point is a daily deposit into your head, not literary purity. If you commute, this rule effectively costs you nothing.

Rule 5: Five minutes of meditation or prayer daily

This rule does not exist in 75 Hard at all, and I think it is the best addition the community made. Five minutes of meditation, prayer, breathwork, or quiet journaling, every day. It is short enough that you cannot argue you have no time, and after a few weeks it becomes the part of the day people say they would keep even if they dropped everything else.

Rule 6: Progress photos on Day 1 and Day 75 only

75 Hard requires a photo every single day, which many people find obsessive and, for anyone with a complicated relationship with their body, actively unhelpful. The 75 medium challenge asks for exactly two photos: one before you start and one when you finish. The comparison at the end is the payoff, and the 73 days in between stay focused on behavior rather than appearance.

Build Your Program, Then Download Your Free 75 Medium Challenge PDF

The tool at the top of this page is a full 75 medium challenge program builder, and it runs right in your browser, so there is no app to download and nothing to sign up for. It takes about two minutes:

1. Enter your start date and body weight. The builder instantly shows your Day 75 finish date, your halfway date, and your personal daily water goal in ounces, liters, cups, and water bottles.
2. Choose your diet and decide how you will use your 10% flexibility: one weekly cheat meal, a small daily allowance, or full 100% strictness if you want the harder version.
3. Plan your week of workouts. Tap a preset like balanced, strength focus, cardio focus, low impact, or walking based, or set each day of the week yourself and mark the days you plan to train outdoors.
4. Pick your reading format, your five minutes of stillness, and, crucially, your miss-a-day policy before you need it.
5. Download your personalized PDF.

What is inside the free printable tracker

The builder generates two files, and both are completely free with no email required. The full planner is a six-page 75 medium challenge PDF that includes your personal rules page, your weekly workout schedule, a before-day-one prep checklist, a dated 75-day checklist where every row shows the actual calendar date and your planned workout for that day, milestone markers at day 25, halfway, day 50, and the finish, a weekly check-in log, and a final reflection page with a completion certificate. The second file is a one-page 75 medium challenge printable wall tracker: all 75 days as circles you cross off, with your dates and rules on a single page you can stick on the fridge. Between them you get a tracker, a checklist, a calendar, and a template, whichever way you prefer to track, and you can come back and print fresh copies any time.

75 Hard vs 75 Medium vs 75 Soft

People usually land on the medium version after bouncing off one of the other two, so here is the honest comparison. I keep dedicated pages with free printable planners for the other two levels as well: the 75 Hard challenge rules and PDF planner and the 75 Soft challenge rules and PDF planner.

My honest take on choosing between them: if you have never strung together 30 consecutive days of exercise in your life, start with 75 Soft. If you have a solid base and want the identity shift without wrecking your schedule, 75 Medium is the sweet spot, and it is the level I would point most people to. If you have completed one of the easier versions and want the full test, that is what 75 Hard is for. Finishing the right level beats abandoning the wrong one, every time.

75 Medium Challenge Diet Plan

The diet rule confuses people more than any other, so here is how I would set up a 75 medium challenge diet plan that survives contact with real life. First, pick a way of eating you have some history with. Day 1 of a 75-day challenge is a terrible time to also try keto for the first time. Second, define your 90% before you start. Vague flexibility becomes unlimited flexibility by week three. The two approaches that work are one planned cheat meal per week, planned meaning you know in advance which meal it is, or a daily allowance of about 10% of your calories, roughly 150 to 200 calories of whatever you genuinely miss.

A sample day on a simple whole-foods version of the 75 medium diet plan might look like this: eggs with vegetables and fruit for breakfast, a big protein-forward salad or grain bowl at lunch, an afternoon snack of yogurt or nuts, and a dinner built around a palm-sized portion of protein, a generous pile of vegetables, and a fist of starch. Nothing exotic, and that is deliberate. A 75 medium challenge meal plan does not need to be impressive; it needs to be repeatable roughly 500 times in a row with minor variations. Batch-cook two dinners on Sunday, keep the same three breakfasts on rotation, and save your decision-making energy for the workouts.

On alcohol: the standard rule is none at all for 75 days. If you already know that rule alone would make you quit, that is useful information, and it means the 75 Soft challenge, which allows drinks on social occasions, is probably your correct starting level.

75 Medium Challenge Workout Plan

Daily exercise with no rest days sounds brutal until you understand that easy days are workouts. Here is the balanced weekly template my program builder starts from, which you can change day by day inside the tool:

• Monday: strength training
• Tuesday: brisk walk, 45 minutes
• Wednesday: strength training
• Thursday: yoga or mobility
• Friday: strength training
• Saturday: run, hike, or long cardio, ideally outdoors
• Sunday: genuine active recovery, easy walk and stretching

That is three hard days, two moderate days, and two easy days, which is a 75 medium challenge workout plan your joints can survive for eleven straight weeks. The most common way people injure themselves out of this challenge is treating every day like a hard day for the first two weeks, then breaking. If you are starting from little or no regular exercise, use the walking-based or low-impact preset for the first two or three weeks and upgrade from there. A 45-minute walk every day for 75 days will genuinely change your body and your head.

How Much Water Should You Drink on 75 Medium?

The formula is half your body weight in pounds, in fluid ounces per day. So 120 lb means 60 oz, 140 lb means 70 oz, 160 lb means 80 oz, 180 lb means 90 oz, 200 lb means 100 oz, and 250 lb means 125 oz, at which point you have essentially arrived at the 75 Hard gallon anyway. If you think in kilograms, the builder converts for you. Two practical tips that made the difference for me: front-load most of your water before mid-afternoon so the rule does not cost you sleep, and pick one bottle, work out how many refills equal your goal, and count refills instead of ounces. If you prefer the harder or softer versions of the rule, the builder also lets you choose the 75 Hard gallon or the 75 Soft three liters and prints whichever goal you pick on your tracker.

How to Do the 75 Medium Challenge, Step by Step

1. Choose a start date about a week away, and check the finish date. Starting 75 days before a wedding, a marathon, or the end of a school year gives the challenge a deadline with teeth. The builder shows your Day 75 date instantly.
2. Build your program with the tool above: diet, flexibility style, weekly workouts, reading format, stillness practice, and water goal.
3. Decide your miss-a-day policy now, while you are calm. The classic restart rule means one bad Tuesday in week nine sends you back to Day 1. I recommend the grace day rule instead: three grace days across the 75, a fourth miss means a restart. It is strict enough to keep you honest and humane enough to be finishable. There is also a repair rule, where a missed day is added to the end and must be made up within 48 hours.
4. Print your PDF, take your Day 1 photo, do the prep checklist on page one, and start.
5. Tick every box every day, do the two-minute weekly check-in every Sunday, and do not negotiate with yourself after 8 pm, which is when every abandoned challenge actually ends.

Tips to Actually Finish All 75 Days

Roughly speaking, the challenge has three acts. Days 1 to 25 run on novelty and motivation; your only job is to make the habits stupidly easy, laying out clothes the night before and never leaving the water bottle out of sight. Days 26 to 50 are the boring middle where novelty is gone and results are not fully visible yet; this is where the tracker earns its keep, because an unbroken chain of crossed-off days becomes something you protect. Days 51 to 75 mostly take care of themselves, and your job is simply not to change a system that is working.

A few more things I would tell a friend on Day 0. Write down your reason on the rules page of your PDF, because around day 20 you will need to read it. Tell one person you are doing this, not the whole internet. Front-load your water. Never miss twice: one missed task is an event, two in a row is the start of quitting. And if you finish a day where everything went wrong except four of the six rules, write down what happened in the notes instead of pretending the day did not exist. The people who finish are not the most disciplined; they are the ones who refuse to let one bad day become three.

75 Medium Challenge Results: What to Expect

Honest expectations, because the before and after posts you have seen are the outliers. Over 75 days of daily movement, mostly consistent eating, proper hydration, and no alcohol, most people see steady fat loss in the range of half a pound to a pound and a half per week if they are eating in a deficit, visibly better skin and less bloating largely thanks to the water and the missing alcohol, dramatically better sleep, and a level of baseline energy that sneaks up on you around week four. The physical before and after is real, but nearly everyone who completes the challenge says the bigger change is internal: 75 consecutive days of keeping promises to yourself quietly rewrites what you believe you are capable of. That is the actual product. The abs, if they show up, are a souvenir.

FAQ

What is the 75 medium challenge?

The 75 medium challenge is a 75-day health and mental toughness program adapted from 75 Hard. Every day for 75 days you follow a diet of your choice 90% of the time with no alcohol, complete one 45-minute workout, drink half your body weight in ounces of water, spend 10 minutes on personal development content, and meditate or pray for 5 minutes, with progress photos on Day 1 and Day 75 only.

What are the 75 medium challenge rules?

The six rules are: follow your chosen diet 90% of the time with no alcohol, do one 45-minute workout daily with no rest days, drink half your body weight in ounces of water, read or listen to 10 minutes of personal development content, meditate or pray for 5 minutes, and take progress photos on the first and last day.

What is the difference between 75 Hard and 75 Medium?

75 Hard requires two daily workouts with one outdoors, a perfectly strict diet, a gallon of water, ten pages of a physical nonfiction book, a daily progress photo, and a full restart if you miss anything. 75 Medium halves the exercise to one daily workout, allows 90% diet adherence, scales water to your body weight, accepts audiobooks and podcasts, only asks for two photos, and adds a daily 5-minute meditation.

What is the difference between 75 Medium and 75 Soft?

75 Soft is gentler again: it allows alcohol on social occasions, includes one active recovery day per week, sets water at three liters for everyone, and lets you read any book. 75 Medium bans alcohol entirely, has no rest days, scales water to your weight, and adds the daily meditation rule.

Can you drink alcohol on the 75 medium challenge?

No. The standard 75 medium challenge rules exclude alcohol for the full 75 days. If that rule is a dealbreaker, the 75 Soft challenge allows drinks on social occasions and is the better starting level.

Can I split the 45-minute workout into two sessions?

The standard rule is one continuous 45-minute session. That said, this is a community challenge with no official referee, so if two 25-minute sessions are what your schedule allows, define that rule for yourself before Day 1 and then hold yourself to it for all 75 days. What breaks the challenge is renegotiating rules mid-stream, not the shape of the sessions.

Is there a 75 medium challenge app?

You do not need one. The program builder on this page runs in your browser on any phone or computer, builds your personalized program, and generates a free printable PDF tracker, so there is nothing to install and no account to create.

Is the 75 medium challenge PDF really free?

Yes. Both the six-page planner and the one-page wall tracker are completely free, with no email signup. Build your program, download your PDF, and print as many copies as you like.

What happens if I miss a day of 75 medium?

You decide before you start, and the builder puts your chosen policy on your tracker. The strict option is a full restart from Day 1, like 75 Hard. The recommended option is three grace days across the 75, with a fourth miss triggering a restart. The third option is a repair rule, where a missed day is added to the end of the challenge and must be made up with a perfect day within 48 hours.

Who created the 75 medium challenge?

Nobody officially. The original 75 Hard program has a well-known creator, but the medium version emerged from the fitness community as people adapted the rules into something more sustainable, which is why you will see small variations in the rules from place to place. The version on this page is the most widely followed one, and the builder lets you adjust any rule to match the version you want to run.