See steps on Apple Watch including distance and directions

Whether you just got an Apple Watch or had it a while ago and haven’t tracked your steps closely before, it’s easy to do. Follow us for steps on Apple Watch including distance and trips climbed as well as daily, monthly, and yearly directions. We’ll also look at how to make custom intricacies for tracking steps directly on Apple Watch faces.

Once you pair your Apple Watch with your iPhone and turn it on, it will automatically track steps whenever you’re wearing it.

You can’t specifically set step count goals, but it’s easy to quickly display and we’ll cover an option to put it on your watch face as well.

In the default Activity app on your Apple Watch, you can see steps, distance, and flights taken. The Fitness app on iPhone shows daily, monthly, and yearly distance trends as well as all the data you can see on your Apple Watch.

How to track and see steps on Apple Watch

Your Apple Watch automatically tracks your steps whenever you wear them. Here’s how to view your progress:

open the Activity app on Apple Watch
Swipe down or scroll down with the Digital Crown
Your daily steps, distance and flights will go up appear below
You can also swipe down and tap Weekly summary More data
To see steps and related activity data for another day, you’ll need to use the Fitness app on iPhone (detailed instructions below)

Add the step count to your Apple Watch face

If you’d rather see your step count directly on the face of your Apple Watch, check out our instructions on this process via the third-party Complication Lab app:

At the moment, Apple does not offer a native way to track steps with complications, so you will have to use a third-party solution such as Complication Lab.

How to track Apple Watch steps on iPhone

There are two ways to look at steps and distance on iPhone.

Daily steps and distance

open the fitness app
Select the Summary tab
Click on Activity rings On the top
swipe down to See your steps and distance at the bottom or choose another date by scrolling the Activity rings at the top or clicking the calendar icon

distance directions

open the fitness app
Select the Summary tab
Swipe down to see directions with distance: after Walk/Run and more
Faucet Show more Next to “Indicators” to display more data

Here’s how it looks:

As shown above, Directions shows you whether movement, exercise, and distance activity is going up or down. Click one to see daily, monthly, and yearly data.

Keep in mind that your data between your Apple Watch and iPhone will not always be completely in sync. But after a few minutes of the new activity, your iPhone should match your watch.

The only caveat would be if you removed your Apple Watch and put your iPhone in with you and did a fair amount of walking or running. In this case, the Health app on the iPhone will show more steps than the Activity app that pulls data from the Apple Watch.