STEPR Review: A Connected Stair Climber Made for Home Gyms

A stair climber is one of those things that people really miss when coming from a commercial gym to a home gym, but the price and particularly the size and height just make it a no deal for most people. Enter the STEPR. This is a smart connected compact stair climber that is made to fit through standard household doorways and an eight foot ceilings, meaning it's actually made specifically for homes and home gyms with limited clearance. STEPR actually has a few different models and this one is the original also called the stepper plus because it features a massive 27 inch touchscreen for all your favorite apps and streaming services while you do your stair climbing or other fitness routines. Stepper also aims to be the modern solution to at home cardio as well as in general home fitness with a lot of features that make it unique. It is slightly but specifically different to commercial stair climbers. So I want to speak to the overall stepper experience and how it's worked for me along with some of the quirks that come with using some smart systems. So let's check it out.

Hey guys, this is Michael with the Jungle Gym Reviews. Today we're viewing the STEPR. This one also called the STEPR plus. This is called the plus because it has the 27 inch touchscreen. This is actually the original model they unveiled. I think it's now been out for well over a year.

I was actually in the original pre-order where I put down a couple hundred dollar deposit and they kept delaying the launch because I think they were collecting funds trying to get manufacturing production and process. Eventually canceled my order and went with a Walmart stair climber which I've done a full review of the balance from SESH signature fitness stair climber. I'll link that in the description below.

That one is a great value. However, it doesn't suit the needs and the audience and the market that this is specifically geared towards because you look at me, I'm a six foot two guy. This is a compact stair climber.

Does not exist till now and now a compact stair climber with a smart touchscreen technology. All that fun stuff. Now before I get into the video, if you could quickly hit that subscribe button below if you haven't already. It's going to continue to help us grow the channel and make sure you get notified when we post both of our weekly reviews throughout the rest of 2025 and all next year. And if you're interested in purchasing this after the view, check out affiliate link in the description below. As I said, this is compact stair climber. The height of it is made to fit in most people's houses, which is really enticing 82 inches tall.

I think it's about 43 inches deep and somewhere in the 27 inch width range will post hopefully a screenshot of the exact dimensions. If not, you can check it out on their website. They do also offer a few different models that have different dimensions as well. And this is a version that has what's called stadium steps. So the height between the steps is only five inches. And this is going to be one of the main things that's different than a commercial stair climber.

Commercial ends up being depending on which specific model you buy anywhere. I believe in like the seven, eight, nine inch height step range. So each step you take, you're taking a higher step. It feels like normal, more traditional stairs like inside your home. I've actually come to really, really like this because unlike the big steps, which tend to be a little bit harder on your joints, I'm someone who played soccer in the past, who has a lot of knee injuries. And as you take those big steps over time, it might hurt your joints a little bit.

But in this case, it's pretty shallow. So it's more akin to what I like, which is more of that like hiking vibe, to be quite honest, because you're not taking huge steps up. But if you want to, you can double step, go up every three steps like this, do something like that.

The one tradeoff, and one thing you'll have to be careful of is because it's compact in pretty much every single way, there's not a whole lot of distance from to back. So double stepping is a little bit hard. Even single stepping, you have to make sure you're exactly kind of in line with the flat step here and here, because you can kind of see the third step is already tilted. And then by the time you get out of this like two foot range here, it folds down underneath again, as with pretty much anything, especially when we've talked about home gyms, by the time you sacrifice some sort of size or stability or price or whatever it is, there are tradeoffs. So the tradeoff to this is shorter steps, which for me as a pro, not as many steps coming at you. But overall, as a stair climber, it ends up being very capable has 20 different speed levels. I think 20 is like 140 steps per minute.

So I'll try to show that in the B roll what that looks like. But if you want to just do a slow, this is as slow as you go. So I didn't do the calculations and actually figure out what this is. But just know this is a snail pace. So I think this is perfectly adequate as slow. And you can adjust the speed all the way up to 20 via these touch handles, or you can tap it on the screen will go up to actually goes up to 25. And now you're doing a nice little, I would equate this to like a seven mile an hour jog. But if anyone's ever done stair climbers before, you'll know in about one minute, my heart rate will be at 248 BPM and I'll be laying on the floor. So plenty fast enough for most people. The stadium height is going to be, I think, either a pro or con for a lot of people. Again, it's a big pro for me. As far as other features about this, it's a modern version of a stair climber.

So it's going to have the things that you want to have a big water bottle because all the Jim bros and Jim girls these days have the big water bottles, tablet, electronic holders, bone holder here. Again, the little stop, start, pause button, excuse me again. Well, I catch my breath from 248 BPM heart rate. But the other cool thing about this, and one of the reasons I actually wanted to get this a long time ago is because I have little kids. One of the things they have down here is a like sensor, an infrared sensor. So if a kid comes in here and puts their hands here, it immediately stops the treadmill. So that's a nice like safety feature. One of the things actually was really bummed about when I ended up with that signature fit in this version, especially when my kids were smaller, I was very, very, very concerned that their hands were going to go in somewhere and they were going to lose a hand or finger. So I was on edge.

Anytime I was doing this stair climber, I was locking the door. So I think that's a very value add feature. And then they have emergency stop here and here. So while you're doing it, if you for any reason as the user need to get off or a kid runs out, mommy, daddy, you quickly put that button, just tap it in, and it locks the machine stops everything from moving.

So I think that's really nice. And then again, kid friendly, most little kids probably can't figure out, you have to like twist it, and it pops back out. And then you have to actually manually start it again from the screen. It's portable too. So if you want to, you know, turn it, move it, you can do that.

It actually comes with these moving handles, which you're supposed to take off after moving, they thread into the frame down here. And they basically stick out about that far, maybe about an inch higher. I have actually left them on this entire time I've had it, because to me, this is actually a big pro. Because if I want to go to move it, all I do is grab these handles, kind of tip it on an angle, and now I can wheel it like a little wheelbarrow anywhere I want. Now that these are out, it is a little bit harder to move. But again, you still can kind of grab underneath here, wheel it how you want, left to right center. It's not super heavy.

I don't know the exact weight off hand. If you're interested, look at that online. The screen, the connected part of this is going to be the other main thing that's enticing the most people. The screen itself has a huge like tilt. So depending on how tall you are, depending on what angle is comfortable for you, you can kind of figure out that way. It does not come forward backwards. It just tilts up and down all your major streaming apps.

I've used Netflix Hulu, Prime Video, Instagram, if you want to use that. The other main thing about this is they offer a lot of like workouts. They want this to not just be for stair climbers.

I'll be 100% honest with you. I have not done any of these because I use my stair climbers for one thing and one thing only, which is climbing stairs. But if you want, you can do some of these other integrated workouts. They have actually on here these little band notches for you to tie like resistance bands to. And the whole point is that you can do, let's say off the stair climber workouts. So whether it's some mixture where they have some coach or you're running through a class where it does a couple of minutes on and then, oh, by the way, you're doing banded XYZ off the side. I think they even sell little kits with bands and potentially even like dumbbells or maybe you just, you know, grab some at home, some adjustable set. So you can kind of make this like a one-stop shop for fitness if you want to do mostly stair climber, but then some on the side strength training.

And they actually make this so it turns. So exactly that you can end up going on the other side, doing workouts off the resistance band mounts, which they even have all the way on the backside down here. So they have one here and then on the other side, they have just various ones on the bottom part of the frame, on the screen part of the frame. So all that's safe and secure and sturdy for you to be able to use resistance bands there. Again, not made for people who are probably doing really heavy lifting, but it's nice that you at least offer that.

So if you want to make this your centerpiece and do light resistance training, that's what you can do. Now the price of this is usually about $5,000. It's around Black Friday right now at the time of filming. So it's like $47.50. That's still quite a bit of money. There are other models kind of go up from there. If you want to do the version without the screen, like this exact same unit, just minus the screen and let's say a dumb screen or a typical analog screen, mostly probably what you're used to for stair climbers. I think it's around like the $4,000, $4,200 maybe.

So that's an option as well. I would suggest if you're going this route in today's day and age and you're spending $4,000, you probably want to spend the extra $700 to get a big screen with connected entertainment, because you don't need a membership to use all the stuff on here, which is nice, especially with some other products we've reviewed that unfortunately do have some sort of paywall in order for you to use an app like Netflix that you already pay for, which is wild to me. So this has no memberships for anything you see on here. They'll offer some classes and stuff that will have memberships, but as far as the main classes on here and the guided workouts, or if you want to do a virtual, there's even an option to do like a virtual hike.

So there's a couple different trails you can go and you just have a big screen of a camera walking through a big hike. Again, not really my thing. If I'm watching something on here, it's going to be Netflix. It's going to be YouTube, but that's where the downside of this comes in because it's connected.

There are things that can go wrong. We'll pop up YouTube here. Again, nice big, great screen. The speakers work great. Bluetooth, everything works great. Syncs with my whoop strap. Got my YouTube account and everything on here.

Perfect. Wi-Fi's fast. Wi-Fi's connected. Goals full screen. Great. We just hit play.

We start free step and the free step will allow you to keep going while all this is happening. Well, the problem here, this app, you'll see, will probably crash in about five seconds here. The YouTube app for whatever reason, and I've confirmed with their support team, has a bug where for some reason it crashes within the first minute of you using it. So it makes it pretty much unusable to actually watch YouTube, which is a major bummer.

And of course, like I mentioned, there it is about 30 seconds into watching YouTube. They've had this streaming platform, whatever app platform they have here for now, quite a period of time. So honestly, I find that a little bit of a bummer that they know this is an issue and they can't yet find a solution.

I think when I talked to the support team, they said they were working to try to find a different version of YouTube or a different operating system maybe to put on this tablet. Which again, when you're paying that kind of money though, you don't want to have that issue. Good news for all you Netflix fans out there. I've watched plenty of Netflix. I've even left Netflix up and running and came back the next day and it works great. The one thing I will say is if you leave this for whatever reason, you just leave, you're done with your workout and you want to come back an hour later, I find it randomly will just freeze. Again, I've tried factory resetting the system.

I've tried installing all the newest updates. It's not a huge issue for me. So let's say I left it right here and I was like, you know what, I'm going to come back in two hours. There's about a 50 50 chance.

I still can't figure out for whatever reason. 50 50 chance I would come back, tap the screen and it just wouldn't respond anymore. So I'd have to manually flip the switch in the back of the unit. It takes about 40 seconds to restart. I've timed it because I do those things.

So it's just another time thing. You just want to get out here. Sometimes you want to get on and you want to just hit go. And that's usually the, that's usually the great thing about this.

You literally can just hit play, hit go, go fast, go slow. And you have a stair climber just like you'd expect at the gym, except the stairs are a little shorter. It's not as tall. And so now you can fit it in your house and you don't have to spend some even more astronomical amount on a stair climber. So for all intents and purposes, I almost, I can't say good enough things about the mechanical actual stair climbing part of this.

There are a couple caveats to know. As I mentioned the step height, the other thing I would say is because of the narrow front to back depth, your feet actually kind of have to go underneath each stair. So if you watch when I'm doing this, because of the length of the stairs and the size of my feet, I'm a size 12, 12 and a half shoe, for example, they have the stairs angled underneath so you can slide your foot in there. So at first you kind of feel like your toe is going to get chopped off, but it's not possible because of how the stairs actually move. But you kind of have to put your foot off the front end of each stair because the narrow front to back depth. So I would say that's one of the other trade-offs that take some time getting used to. And if you do have really big feet, I would say probably 13, 14 or bigger.

Honestly, you're going to run out of room or you're going to have to like step on your toes rather than the center of your foot. So that is again, something to note. If you do want something bigger, they do have bigger models that offer the same thing, but then they do start increasing in price as well. So there's just a lot of trade-off, some considerations in all of this.

For me, if I'm spending this kind of money, I think it works great, but I would be a little disappointed with some of the connectivity issues that I mentioned. The last one on the screen that really actually bugs me quite a little bit, and it's not the end of the world, but I do want to point it out is when you're moving, you want to go to entertainment, let's go to YouTube. We're not even going to play a video, which is fine because we know that in a minute it will bug out for whatever reason.

We're here at YouTube. You can't actually scroll in the middle of the screen because it will open a video. So again, it's just simple things like this that's like, oh, now I realize they're maybe not a tech company optimizing all of this. And yes, they're using a third-party platform that has apps and stuff and they expect it to work, but there are just some things that don't work as well as I think they should. So if I'm sitting here in the middle of the screen and trying to move up or down, it will start clicking on the videos themselves.

So it'll just start like opening them. It took me so many months to have this to figure out what was going on. And my wife, thankfully, God bless her, figured out you have to put your fingers in the middle of like the white bars or anything in between the two videos like hyperlink thumbnail things because then the operating system and the touchscreen like realizes, oh, you're actually just trying to scroll and not click on a thing. But if anyone's used a phone before, you literally just like kind of quickly scroll up like this, but in this case, it opens apps. So again, I feel like I'm might be griping over something that's small, but when I'm paying this price and I'm expecting a nice connected touchscreen, I don't want to have a little bit of a learning curve.

I want to have my YouTube work, thankfully, Netflix and other things works. And this is not even about the actual use of the stairs. But I think it's important to note because you're paying that kind of money. So you expect a certain level of operation. Good thing though about the unit and the operation is they offer like a super long warranty. I think it's like a 10 year frame, two year parts.

So if you are spending that kind of money, at least no a it should last a long time. B they will have support C and their support is really responsible. I will give them extreme credit.

The people I've talked to respond to my emails in like 20 minutes, 30 minutes, which is kind of wild to be quite honest. So I've used this one to two to three times a week for the stair climbing, especially me zone to water, phone, everything else, completely great. So as a stair climber, it works great. I definitely I would say recommend this because unfortunately, there's not a whole lot in between the price ranges of a commercial, truly commercial one that will not fit through doors and will not fit in ceilings and something like this. So you're paying because they've kind of honestly kind of come up with something that's perfect for home gyms that doesn't otherwise have competitors or already exist yet.

The only other one I would recommend is that signature fitness balance from signature fitness Walmart one. That is a completely import quality, potentially questionable, but it's sold and fulfilled by Walmart. When I bought it is $1,500.

I think it's still about that range. It'll get shipped to your door. It weighs like 400 pounds.

So heavy. You will not get it through doors. You will not get it downstairs. You have to kind of put it in whatever room it shows up in, but it's only $1,500 and you can add a three year warranty from Walmart for like 150 bucks. So it's like, okay, then I'm spending let's say $2,000 out the door on something that may or may not last and hopefully Walmart will come pick up if it does break.

It's like 2000 versus 4,400. Really going to end up being up to you, your specific needs, your specific situation. And honestly for me, I really like the stadium steps. I really do. So for me, it's worked out great.

Mine is some of the quirks that come with the smart system. So I will leave it up to you, whether or not that's worth it to you and your home gym. So guys, that's it for this review of the Stepper slash Stepper plus stair climber. As always, if you have any questions or comments, please leave them down below.

I'd be happy to answer at least try. Thanks for tuning into the Jungle Gym Reviews. We'll see you next time. Take it easy. Peace.