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Reflections on my 75 HARD experience

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I was unsatisfied with my health and fitness level as I started to hit middle age. Over time, I’ve picked up some bad habits and lost a lot of the discipline that I once possessed when I was an infantryman. I decided it was time to take drastic steps to get back in shape, and I heard about a challenge called 75 HARD that seemed to be a good fit.

What is 75 HARD?

You probably haven’t heard of 75 HARD, but you may have. In a nutshell, 75 HARD is a mental fitness program with a demanding physical component. There are five rules:

  • Follow a structured diet with no deviations.
  • Complete two workouts a day spaced three hours apart, with at least one workout being performed outside.
  • Drink a gallon of water each day.
  • Read ten pages per day.
  • Take a progress picture.

You must comply with these five rules for 75 consecutive days. If you fail to comply with any rule, you start over from day one.

The challenge is not based on a scientific approach to weight loss or physical conditioning, nor is it really intended to be. The challenge is a mental fitness program. Can you follow these rules for 75 days straight with no deviations or excuses?

You have broad latitude to determine how you comply with each rule. The challenge doesn’t specify what diet you follow, what workouts you do, or what books you read. You are responsible for determining what path to follow within the parameters set forth by the challenge.

Why I took the challenge

To put it simply, I took on the 75 HARD challenge to save my life. That may sound dramatic, but I am at a transitional phase in life where my ability to achieve positive health and fitness outcomes is going to begin to decline soon. I’m hitting middle age. The habits I have built now will follow me for the rest of my life, and they will become increasingly difficult to change with each passing year.

I want to be a role model to my son. A father should set the standard that the son measures himself against, and the son should strive to surpass him. This is how it should be.

I want to be an active grandparent when I enter that season of life. I have one daughter who will be an adult in a few months, and another who is entering high school soon. I could be a grandfather in the next decade. When that time comes, I need the energy and fitness to keep up with the little ones so my children can rely on me to help them raise the next generation.

I want to avoid the health complications others in my family have faced as they aged. My mother, father, and grandmother all had type 2 diabetes. My father had high blood pressure and several strokes. My grandmother had dementia. While there may be genetic components to these conditions, their unhealthy lifestyles contributed heavily. I need to be healthy and fit if I am going to have a chance at a different outcome.

I want to mitigate the effects of cognitive decline. My occupation is software engineering. I love learning new things and building challenging projects. While most people fantasize about what their retirement will be like, I have no intention of ever retiring. I want to work until the day I die, and to do so, I need to adopt a lifestyle that keeps me sharp as I age.

I want to reconnect with the man I was during my days in the US Army infantry. I was disciplined, fit, resilient, and tough. I’ll never again be a twenty-something-year-old badass working with crew-served machine guns and going on missions in Afghanistan. But it would be cool to feel like that guy again.

My path through the challenge

Everyone has a different path in meeting their health and fitness goals. I don’t profess to having all the answers, but I figured out what worked for me.

Diet

For my diet, I chose a simple calorie deficit. I have tried diets like Keto, Paleo, and Mediterranean in the past, and they did not work for me. So, for this challenge, I took a basic approach: limiting my food intake to two healthy meals a day (breakfast and dinner) between the hours of 1000 and 1800.

One of the reasons that diets haven’t worked for me in the past is that they require too much thought. For the diet to work, I need something that I can just set and forget. Figure out the meals once, and then eat those every day.

For breakfast, I settled on two strips of bacon, two over-easy eggs, and a slice of sourdough bread. For dinner, I chose a ribeye steak, two over-easy eggs, and a slice of sourdough bread. I made both in my cast-iron pan, which made clean-up quick and easy. Eventually, I switched my dinners up a bit, opting for a more balanced meal of baked chicken and quinoa.

I found this structured diet to be easy to follow. I was satisfied after every meal and did not feel the urge to cheat. Most importantly, I was getting the macros I needed while also losing weight sustainably. I supplemented with a multivitamin and krill oil to get the vitamins and nutrients I was missing.

Exercise

I wanted to improve my fitness, but I needed to keep in mind that I’m a middle-aged disabled veteran who cannot do the sort of workouts I did in my younger years. With this in mind, I crafted an approach that helped me build back up to a solid foundation for the future.

For my outdoor workout, I chose a daily vigorous walk through my neighborhood. Later in the challenge, I increased the difficulty by using my old Army rucksack (a trusty ALICE pack, of course) and varying the walk’s distance. My neighborhood is full of hills, some with gradual slopes and some with fairly steep slopes. This added to the difficulty as well. Each walk/ruck worked up a decent sweat while minimizing the risk of injury.

The real intensity came from my second workout. My goals for improving my fitness were to increase my strength, flexibility, and VO2Max.

For strength training, I chose to follow the StrongLifts program. This program has two different workouts that you alternate with rest days in between. Workout A is squat, bench press, and barbell row. Workout B is squat, overhead press, and deadlift. As you can see, the program focuses on compound lifts, with each exercise (except the deadlift) performed in five sets of five reps. The weight increases gradually with each workout.

For flexibility, I opted for slow-flow yoga. Apple Fitness has several different flows to follow, so I kept it simple and just rotated between them. Jonelle is my homegirl.

To improve my VO2Max, I did interval rowing with a heart rate monitor strap to track the zones I was in. I did 4 minutes in zone 4, followed by 3 minutes in zone 2, repeating 5 times. I did a 10-minute warm-up and cool-down on either end of the workout to fill out the 45-minute time requirement.

I consistently followed a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday lifting schedule. Initially, I focused on improving my flexibility, so I did slow-flow yoga on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, with Sunday as an agility drill day. I switched to interval rowing on those days about halfway through the challenge, with slow-flow yoga on Sunday.

Reading

Reading was definitely the easiest part of the challenge for me, and I frequently exceeded the ten-page requirement. I intentionally picked books that would help improve my skills as a software engineer.

I finished three books in their entirety:

I ended the challenge about halfway through The Kubernetes Book by Nigel Poulton. I briefly considered muscling through it, but I didn’t want to shortchange myself. Kubernetes has a steep learning curve, and I like to explore the concepts in greater depth than the book presents.

What I did not like

The only aspect of the challenge that I did not like was the water requirement. Drinking a gallon of water every day is absurd. The frequent urge to urinate messed up my sleep schedule and forced me to consider how best to time my trips out. While I still plan to stay hydrated, I have no intention of drinking this amount of water daily ever again.

What I did like

In short, I liked everything else about the challenge.

It feels great to eat clean and healthy food without having to think about it. I have completely changed my relationship with food. I no longer derive pleasure from eating. Food is simply fuel at this point. Another nice benefit is that I no longer devote much time to thinking about what I am going to eat.

Exercising regularly has improved my overall fitness and confidence. I always look forward to working out, and I get a nice mental boost from completing a challenging workout. Overall, I feel younger and have more energy.

I did not benefit much from the rule that requires reading, because I was already doing it. That said, I am glad it was part of the challenge, because I might have been tempted to cut it from my routine to make room for the other stuff.

As much as I did not like the daily gallon of water I had to drink, there were some additional constraints nested under that rule that I did like. Specifically, the challenge prohibits drinking alcohol. While I am not a big drinker, I am the kind of guy who enjoys a beer with his meal. Cutting alcohol completely out has massive health benefits over time, and I plan to abstain from alcohol for the foreseeable future.

The biggest benefit I received from doing the challenge was increased discipline. I built some strong habits during the challenge, but it was the discipline I had to exert to stay on the path that made it possible.

Results

My weight dropped from 233 lbs at the start of the challenge to 203.9 lbs at the end. While I am still considered overweight for my size, I am no longer obese, which is a huge win. I believe I can hit 170-180 lbs in the next six months, which is my target.

My strength has increased significantly. I am not quite at the level I was in the Army, but that is OK. I am content to continue gradually increasing the weight I lift over time, and I do not have any particular milestones in mind. I started from the absolute minimum and have worked up to a level that I am proud of. I still haven’t tried a one-rep max of any lift since I work out by myself, but I am also not that worried about knowing the exact number I could lift; what I am working on regularly is the number that matters to me.

My squat increased from 45 lbs (just the bar) to 210 lbs. This number is the one I am most proud of. It feels good to squat more than your weight, which not many people can do.

My deadlift increased from 90 lbs to 230 lbs. I plateaued for a while at 220 lbs because I didn’t have any more plates to add on, but I just got two more 45 lb plates, so I’m back at it.

My bench press increased from 45 lbs to 185 lbs. This is the only lift that I actually exceeded my old Army self on.

My overhead press increased from 45 lbs to 120 lbs. I had to go back down to 105 lbs for a bit. I was struggling with form and tweaked my back; going back down allowed me to correct my form, and then I worked my way back to 120 lbs.

My barbell row increased from 65 lbs to 165 lbs. My form was utterly wrong for this when I started. After correcting my form, I was able to progress nicely.

Recommendation

Do I recommend the challenge to others? Maybe. It is entirely up to you whether or not something like this is worthwhile. There are many routes to getting back into shape, and this challenge worked for me. I recommend it if you respond well to challenges and value discipline. Getting in shape is not the primary purpose of the challenge (though it definitely helps you get in shape), so if that is your intention, then explore a different option. However, if you are seeking to become mentally tough and discipline yourself, then by all means, take the challenge.

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