Gentler Streak has always approached fitness from a more human angle, and version 5.5 builds on that philosophy with two meaningful changes. Starting June 5, the app will count your daily steps, even when you haven’t logged a workout, and now syncs perceived exertion data directly from Apple’s Workouts app.
Daily step count is a subtle but important addition. Rather than pushing you to chase arbitrary goals, Gentler Streak treats steps as part of the bigger picture: how your body moves, recovers, and adapts. The update doesn’t just dump raw numbers into your dashboard. It shows your step count alongside distance, walking time, heart rate, and flights climbed, and compares your activity to past trends in a way that helps you understand patterns, not obsess over them. The two-week calendar lets you scroll back through previous days to reflect on movement without pressure.
This feature can be especially useful for people with chronic health conditions or those whose days involve a lot of walking. It captures the kind of unstructured activity that often slips through the cracks and ensures your guidance adjusts to reflect your real-world movement. A future update will even introduce a new insight called “steps to overreaching,” which could help some users identify warning signs before flare-ups happen.
Apple Health users also get an upgrade. If you’ve been using RPE, Rate of Perceived Exertion, inside Apple’s Workouts app, Gentler Streak can now read that data and incorporate it into your Activity Path. That means your guidance gets a fuller view of your effort, not just what you manually enter inside the app. Of course, if the guidance starts to feel off, you can scale back on how much influence RPE has or lean on the app’s automatic effort detection instead.
Both features are optional and can be toggled in the app’s settings. Step tracking is enabled by default and lives in the Wellness section of the Streak tab, while Apple RPE syncing is off by default and can be activated manually. In both cases, Gentler Streak will request additional permission to read Health data, but nothing leaves your device. Your data stays with you.
With version 5.5, Gentler Streak continues to refine the balance between intelligent fitness tracking and realistic, human-centered goals. No pressure, no streak chasing, just useful insights that help you stay in tune with your body.
Download Gentler Streak here.
