Explainer: What is '75 Soft'? The viral wellness trend everyone is trying this new year

New year, new wellness trend? Nicole Glennon looks at the trend every content creator seems to be signing on for in 2025

The 75 Soft Challenge is based on the 75 Hard Mental Toughness Program penned by entrepreneur and motivational speaker Andy Frisella

Every year, it seems like a new wellness trend takes over our FYP as we approach the new year — and 2025 has proven no different.

As someone who usually starts the new year with good intentions before quickly following off the bandwagon, I’ve tried many of these challenges in the past. Veganuary? You bet. Thirty days of meditation? Tried (and failed!). Fitness challenges? Too many to count.

The flavour of the month for social media this January appears to be ‘75 soft’, a reworking of the better-known and, frankly terrifying, ‘75 hard’. Here’s what it involves and why I’ll be giving it a go.

The origins of the challenge 

The 75 Soft Challenge is based on the 75 Hard Mental Toughness Program penned by entrepreneur and motivational speaker Andy Frisella.

The original programme, first devised back in 2019, is a gruelling, unforgiving challenge involving five daily tasks with one overarching rule — if you do not complete the five daily tasks every single day, you start back at day one.

In this exceptionally difficult challenge, the five daily tasks are;

• Follow a diet with no alcohol or cheat meals 
• Drink 4 litres of water a day 
• Complete two 45-minute workouts, one of which must be done outside 
• Read 10 pages of a non-fiction book 
• Take a progress photo 

How is 75 Soft different?

Now, as someone who has tried and failed at many health and fitness challenges before, the rules of 75 Hard immediately set off alarm bells in my head. No rest days, no cheat meals, no allowance for an illness or special occasion? Now that sounds like something that is destined to fail.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that the #75SoftChallenge is racking up thousands of mentions on TikTok, with its more balanced approach to motivating users to improve their daily lives this new year.

The key aspect of 75 Soft is that the rules are a lot looser and designed for you to manipulate your own goals and motivations. Here are the basic guidelines.

• Eat well and only drink on social occasions 
• Drink 3 litres of water daily 
• Move for 45 minutes every day, with one day an active recovery day 
• Read 10 pages of a book daily 

In comparison to the 75 Hard programme, there are also no rules about having to start from day one if, for some reason, you don’t complete every single task every day.

Balanced approach

Wynona Grant, a coach at F45 Training, told me she thinks 75 Soft is a much more balanced approach for the general population to engage in this New Year's season.

"When you look at something like 75 Hard, it's all or nothing. Some people do have that all-or-nothing mentality, but what happens when you are a beginner or you're less advanced is that you can take on more than you can chew.

Wynona Grant, a coach at F45 Training

"If you're looking at something that tells you you need to do two workouts every day, hit an obscene amount of steps, cut out every bit of junk food from your diet, zero alcohol.. those are probably big changes to where most people are coming from," she says. "You might think it's this motivating thing, but what actually happens is you're restricting yourself so much that you really crave the things that you're cutting out.

It's just human nature to resist restriction.

"It sounds cliché, but balance is a lot better in the long term.

"Something like 75 Soft is a lot more obtainable, more suitable for the general population. It involves small changes to your everyday lifestyle, your fitness choices, your diet choices, and general daily habits, like reading, and they're all like a domino effect. When you start creating habits like that, habit stacking and all those things, that's when your mindset starts to shift, and then you're in a better place to make better food choices and to make better daily exercise choices."

Grant also advises giving yourself some leeway with challenges like this, and remember that they are most valuable if they are a way of kickstarting more permanent changes, rather than completing an arbitrary number of days. 

"Cutting out all alcohol is fine," she says, by way of example. "For a lot of people it may be one of the easier ones to do. But let's say in January, you have some big social event, your best friend's wedding, you [might feel] you're forcing yourself to miss out, just for the sake of a 75 day challenge, when what you should actually be focusing on is permanent lifestyle changes. 

Many people burnout in January because they take on too much too quickly with fitness goals

"Doing something for a period of 75 days is great, but what's the point in going all in for 75 days. If, after that, you're just gonna let loose?

"You see it all the time, people come into the gym seven days a week in January, but by the time January is over, if not well before, they're so burned out they don't want to see the inside of the gym again.  

"The reason for that is that they're coming in at a level that is so far beyond the level that they were at last month, and they just can't handle that intensity or frequency, and then they give up, and that whole lifestyle change is out the window for them.

"Whereas, someone coming in three or four days doing less intensity and less frequency, they are much more likely to stick to it. They get to the end of January, they're not completely burnt out, they stick with it through February and then into March. And sure, once you're into March doing that consistent effort, you're a quarter of the way through your year already, and you're much, much more likely to stick with it through the entire year."