Turn a walk's distance and time into steps in Apple Health

When do you need to add steps by hand?

Your iPhone only counts a step it was physically present for.

• The phone stayed in a locker, a bag or at home while you walked.
• You work somewhere phones are not allowed on the floor.
• The battery died halfway through a hike.
• The phone sat on a treadmill console or a pram instead of in your pocket.

A common case is the locker at the gym: the treadmill shows the distance and roughly how long you were on it, which is exactly what Fit as needs: distance or duration, plus pace.

Can you add steps to Apple Health without an app?

The Health app lets you type a raw step count for a time, but you have to know the number of steps. Most people know the distance or the duration instead. Fit as does the conversion for you and also writes the walking + running distance, so both totals move together.

How to add steps to Apple Health with Fit as

1. On first launch, go through the welcome pages. On Connect Apple Health, tap Continue and allow the data types in the Health sheet. If you tapped Not now, turn access on later from Settings > Manage Health Access.
2. Open the Home tab. Under Activity, choose Walking, Running or Hiking.
3. Pick Distance & Duration if you know how far you went, or Duration & Pace if you know how long you walked and roughly how fast.
4. Set Distance and Duration with the steppers. The preview line shows the distance and speed, and below it the estimated steps.
5. Tap the orange button, for example Log Walking — 6561 Steps.
6. In the free version, the Log This Walk prompt appears: tap Watch Ad (or Subscribe to PRO to skip ads from now on).
7. Look for the green confirmation, for example Walking logged — 6561 steps to Health. The Today total at the top of Home updates.

Worked example: a 5 km walk in one hour

These are the values the Home tab shows, computed with the app's own formula (distance divided by a 0.762 m stride, whole steps shown).

Where do the steps land in time?

A Home tab log is always placed today, ending at the moment you tap. It starts one duration earlier, or at midnight if that would fall on yesterday. If you already logged something today, the new entry starts where the last one ended, so two logs never overlap.

Example: a 60-minute walk logged at 10:00 fills 09:00-10:00. Another 60-minute walk logged at 10:05 gets the slot 10:00-10:05 and all its steps go into those five minutes. The daily total is right either way; only the hourly chart in Health looks bunched.

Common mistakes

• Expecting a Running or Hiking workout: the Home tab writes only steps and walking + running distance. The activity choice is a label.
• Typing miles as kilometres: the app is metric only. 1 mile = 1.609 km.
• Logging the same walk twice: there is no delete button in Fit as. Remove the extra entry in the Health app.
• Relying on the Notes field: notes are not saved.

Questions and answers

You might also like

• Steps per km by stride length: the 0.762 m calculator in Fit as · Fit as
• How to edit or delete steps you added to Apple Health · PokeT-Walk

More Fit as guides

• How to add a workout to Apple Health manually, with date and time
• Steps per km by stride length: the 0.762 m calculator in Fit as
• How many steps is a 1 hour walk, or 30 minutes of walking?
• Log a treadmill walk or run as a real workout in Apple Health
• Logged steps not showing in Apple Health after a Fit as log: what to check
• How do I log a run I did without my phone?
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• All questions about Fit as
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