75 Hard with friends: run the 75 days as a crew

What 75 Hard actually asks for

Five tasks, every day, for 75 days. The program is Andy Frisella's and the binding wording is his, so read it at the source: the 75 Hard rules. In one sentence each:

1. Follow a structured diet picked for your own goals, with no cheat meals and no alcohol.
2. Do two 45-minute workouts, three hours apart, one of them outdoors.
3. Drink a gallon of water, plain and unflavoured, nothing mixed in.
4. Read ten pages of non-fiction with your eyes - audiobooks do not count.
5. Take a progress picture, all 75 days.

And the rule that makes it what it is: miss any task on any day and you go back to day 1. Frisella is explicit that it does not matter whether you are on day 2 or day 74. The program costs nothing - his page says it will not cost you a penny - so the only currency in it is whether you told anyone you had started.

The official app, and the thing people keep asking it for

There is an official 75 Hard app from 44Seven Media. It is free to download and needs a subscription: the App Store listing shows Monthly Access at $4.99 and a Full Year Membership at $39.99, and its description opens by saying so.

What its public one- and two-star reviews ask for is other people. One reviewer, under the heading "Pointless": Add / follow your friends! Imagine if you could track your friends or your communities progress too? (App Store review.) Another, at one star: I thought there'd be more, like tracking with friends, link to other apps. It's disappointingly nothing but a checklist. (App Store review.) That is the gap. The checklist is not the hard part of 75 Hard. Day 19 at 11:40 pm is.

How to run it in Rootmates

Start a challenge from the Group tab. Two sensible shapes, and most crews want the first.

• One habit, 75 days.Call it "75 Hard day done" and tick it only on a day all five tasks happened. A challenge is one habit by design, so this fits exactly: one countdown, one number per person, and the honesty sits in your own thumb.
• Five habits, one squad. To itemise the tasks, make them five of your own daily habits - diet, workout one, workout two, water, pages - and put the crew in a regular group instead. Your squad sees the whole list, so everyone sees which of the five went missing, not just that the day did.

Either way the invite is a link you paste into the chat you already use, and it works for somebody who has never opened the app. Free to download on the App Store. Android is coming.

The daily photo goes in the squad room: chat, photos, and each closed day appearing in the conversation in order. A proof picture is a photo you post in the room like any other, so the whole crew sees day 40 next to day 1. No public feed, no follower count.

On day 75 the challenge archives itself and hands you a recap with everyone's final count. Then you either go again or convert it into a regular group, which is the entire reason this app exists.

What this app does not do, said plainly

Rootmates does not enforce 75 Hard. It has no idea whether your workout was outside, whether it ran 45 minutes, what was in the glass, or whether those ten pages were read or listened to. It records what you tick and shows your group. The mechanism is social, not verification.

A freeze is not a 75 Hard restart.The wallet holds two, you spend one on a day you genuinely missed and the streak chain holds, and a spent freeze grows back after four consecutive fully-kept weeks. That is a mechanic for ordinary habits over years, and the precise opposite of Frisella's rule, which puts a missed task back on day 1. Running his program, follow his rule and let the app's number be wrong.

So use it for what it is good at: the crew, the room, the count, the recap.

Where this app came from, and 75 Soft

Rootmates grew out of a 75-day challenge app the two of us built and ran with our own friends. It worked, then stopped working on day 76 - people closed the last day and quit. The part doing the work was never the number. It was that six people could see whether the box was ticked that morning. So we took the deadline out and kept the witnesses. About has the rest.

If 75 days of that is more than you want, there is 75 Soft - not Frisella's, with no official rulebook, widely attributed to the fitness creator Stephen Gallagher and surfaced on TikTok in 2022. The commonly circulated version keeps ten pages and the water, cuts the second workout, allows a rest day a week, drops the daily photo, and has no restart rule. Wordings differ, so agree yours before day 1. Same setup here: one challenge, 75 days, one invite link. And if this is attempt three at a 75-day anything, read restarting habits after you quit.

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