If you’re looking for one health-and-fitness regime to rule them all, it’s 75 Hard
Price: $5/£5
Version: 1.15
Size: 43.5 MB
Seller: 44Seven Media, LLC
Platform: iPhone
75 Hard is not for the faint-hearted. It’s a “mental toughness” fitness program that aims to change the way you think and behave for the better. Based on the infamously grueling 75-day program of the same name, 75 Hard is an iPhone app that promises to change your life – if you follow its strict rules.
Created by motivational speaker Andy Frisella, the challenge is a 75-day-long regime involving a handful of simple, flexible rules: you must follow a diet, drink a gallon of water per day, perform two 45-minute workouts, read 10 pages of nonfiction per day, and – as you’ve probably seen on the likes of Instagram and TikTok, where #75HardChallenge hashtags abound – take a daily progress picture.
75 Hard for iOS.
Cue 75 Hard for iOS, which aims to help users track their progress and in doing so, hopes to add an additional layer of motivation. When you download and install the app, you’ll find that 75 Hard offers a pre-populated list of reminders for each of these rules. On each one of your 75 days, users can tick-off each item. 75 Hard keeps track of your current day as you march on towards your goal.
Set reminders.
For anyone looking to take on the 75 Hard challenge, this app will undoubtedly prove useful. You can set time-specific reminders for items in the list, like your workouts or your reading task. And on each day, it’s possible to make notes of any challenges, insights, or breakthroughs you achieve.
We said 75 Hard isn’t for the faint-hearted – because if you miss a day in the app or fail to achieve all of your objectives, the app will try to send you back to Day 1. The purpose of 75 Hard is to build a 75-day continuous streak – sometimes, it takes people a few attempts to achieve the challenge themselves. Although usefully, if you simply forget to tick everything off, you can let the app know and you won’t lose your current streak.
What happened?
In 75 Hard’s settings, you can customize how progress pictures are saved and whether the app issues a “1 hour left” notification at 23:00. These are nice additions, although there’s no option to tweak or remove individual items from the daily schedule in 75 Hard. The app adheres rigidly to the 75 Hard challenge, which some users may dislike. That said, the 45-minute exercise slots aren’t prescriptive about what sort of exercise you should be doing. This is one way in which the app does concede that varying fitness levels and abilities may wish to go about the challenges differently.
It’s not over.
It’s also a shame to see that there’s no companion iPad or Apple Watch app available for 75 Hard. Ticking off items from your wrist would be nice, though this isn’t a game-changer. The app doesn’t communicate with Health, either, meaning your logged water intake won’t appear in Apple’s default health-tracking app. These might seem like small qualms, but over the course of 75 days, they could add up.
If you’re looking to take on the 75 Hard challenge, 75 Hard for iPhone is a great app – it’ll help you track your progress and should keep you on the straight and narrow. It goes without saying, though, that anyone who isn’t fully committed to the 75 Hard mantra will find this app way too restrictive and prescriptive, and would be better off finding something else.