Listen, when you’re newly postpartum and just trying to get out of the house, taking your baby on a walk is one of the easiest ways to do it. You don’t have to load them in and out of the car, you don’t have to spend any money when you get where you’re going. You can throw on a podcast, your baby will probably snooze — it’s great. But if you’re someone who wants to keep track of your steps, you’ve probably noticed your phone (sitting in the stroller cup holder) or your Apple Watch (pushing the stroller itself) aren’t accurately counting your steps. One mom, Ali Jayson, took it upon herself to fix that, building her very own app: Stroller Steps.
Whether you work out often and track your physical activity religiously, or you like to monitor your steps as a general way to make sure you’re moving enough each day, it is so irritating when your literal fitness tracker doesn’t count your steps. This is especially true when you’re postpartum, and walking is one of the first forms of exercise that’s safe to do (and getting out the door with a wee babe is no small feat). Apple Watches, FitBits, and Garmins all seem to miss steps when you’re not swinging your arms, but instead holding onto a stroller handle to push. Jayson noticed this on her first walk postpartum, so she bought a traditional pedometer to compare the steps it counted to her watch, which confirmed her suspicions. She took to forums online, where she found numerous active threads of other parents annoyed by the issue.
“They’re like, ‘I know I wasn’t getting credit,’ or, ‘It feels like if they weren’t tracked, they didn’t happen.’ Or some people are like, ‘I knew my stroller steps counted for more, but I wasn’t getting credit for them.’ The truth is they do count for more. You’re pushing sometimes a 20-pound stroller with a 15 to 35-pound baby. You are burning more calories in that instance, and tons of parents were missing that formula,” Jayson says. “Postpartum is a really challenging time, and you want the win, and you want to rely on the devices that you've come to rely on.”
Some of those parents online just gave up tracking their walks, while others actually pushed strollers one-handed and swung their Watch-bearing arm even harder to ensure their steps were logged (and usually ended up with some wrist pain in their pushing hand, Jayson says).
So, with her background in tech and design, she set about creating her own app for Apple Watch that accurately tracks steps and calories burned when the user is pushing a stroller, and adjusts those iconic rings accordingly. You can download it straight from the App Store and begin a 30-day free trial. You can start a walk with one tap directly from your Apple Watch face, and end the walk just as easily. The step counts and calories burned are then added to both Apple Health and your Apple Fitness Rings, so the data is available on your iPhone, too.
Stroller Steps launched in March 2024 and has already helped parents track over 4.2 million steps that Apple Watches would have lost otherwise. For now the app is exclusive to Apple Watch, but Jayson has already received requests to expand the app to an iPhone-compatible version, as well as one for FitBits and Garmin trackers. Once your free trial ends, Stroller Steps is 99 cents per month. You can learn more about how the app works at strollersteps.com or download it from the App Store.
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