Should You Do 75 Hard Or Not?

Many people who feel like they’re stuck, don’t have good habits, and aren’t disciplined enough to achieve their goals consider taking on Andy Frisella’s 75 Hard Challenge. 

To complete the challenge, every day without exception you need to do two 45 minute workouts, read 10 pages of a nonfiction book, follow a structured and clean diet, drink a gallon of water, and take a progress picture. And while it’s an extremely effective program, it achieves a certain result that is often different from what people want to get out of it.

What 75 Hard is really good for is proving something to yourself. If you’ve been low on confidence, feeling complacent, or fed up with being overweight, the 75 Hard Challenge is a great pattern interrupt. It requires that you take control of your life and reminds you that your choices are within your control. It’s by prioritizing these daily actions despite adversity, travel and life circumstances that you prove to yourself that you have what it takes to do what you said you were going to do. In that way, it’s extremely effective in reshaping your beliefs and reminding you of the power you have to be the person you want to be in the world. 

But for the far majority of people who take it on, 75 Hard is not a sustainable lifestyle. The level of rigidness that the challenge demands is impractical for real life. We’re often presented with situations where it’s reasonable to make exceptions to the rule. Again, proving that you are greater than life’s circumstances is the value of the challenge, but that comes at a real cost that most people are unwilling to pay forever. So naturally there’s a layer of discernment and choice that we all must navigate when it comes to balancing life, and that’s a skill that 75 Hard does not help you to develop.

And in terms of your transformation, it’s important to consider the nature of a challenge. A Challenge is a temporary pursuit with a fixed end date. In that pursuit is a certain environment where you’ve made a commitment to a certain level of follow through, and you’re holding yourself personally accountable to it. When the challenge ends and that environment fades away, they go back to their previous environment where they’re accustomed to making their previous choices. The same choices they were dissatisfied with, which caused them to take on the Challenge in the first place.

For example, let’s say someone has a tight transfer in the airport for a work trip. During 75 Hard they would make an effort to track down a salad for lunch. After 75 Hard, they don’t have the same commitment to eating healthy and are much more likely to select a more convenient option.

That’s why many people start 75 Hard to prove something to themselves, succeed in doing so, but then slowly slip back into the same bad habits, unhealthy balance, and old routines they used to have. There’s no continuation plan to make the intentionality, discipline, and true prioritization of their health that they built in the Challenge something that lasts. 

For many, the real intention people take on 75 Hard is to begin a new, healthier lifestyle. It's not just to have 75 healthy days. And the truth of it is, the challenge fails to offer that (other than providing a highly-committed and structured to it).

To address that for myself, I’ve created a system for that helps me hold myself accountable to a higher standard 365 days a year, stay disciplined and aware of my choices, and live with more intentionality. It takes only 5 minutes a day so it’s manageable to keep up with and creates the right environment to sustain my higher performance. If you want to check it out, I’ve got a video where I walk you through my Self Improvement Scorecard here!