I use Arc Timeline for recording my hiking routes and storing them in Apple Health.
Whenever I stop for some minutes to look at the scenery or have a picknic, Arc records a stop. This is good, because I don‘t want all the standing time in my recorded route (it accumulates errors in the recorded route length due to GPS inaccuracies etc).
However, at the end of the day, it would be nice to have the whole hike recorded as a single workout in Apple Health along with the complete track recording.
Currently what I have to do is save the individual parts between the stops as workouts. This means a a single hike is usually split into 5-6 workouts in Apple Health, which is not ideal when I want to look at it a year later or share the GPX with friends.
Perhaps a solution to this would be a new option to select multiple trips to merge (concatenate while cutting out the stationary data) and save to Apple Health?
Oh this is an interesting one! Not what I thought you would be asking when I read the title.
The “Save to workouts” button is an area of Arc that hasn’t had much attention (ok let’s be honest: any attention at all) since the day it was first added. I was actually kind of wondering if anyone used it anymore!
But what you describe there is a genuinely useful improvement that could be made to it. Hmm. I definitely see your point.
I guess the unsatisfying answer is that in order to prioritise the feature idea we’ve have to submit it to the Changemap site and get votes on it to see how popular it is.
My own approach to this one is to come from the opposite direction. I let Arc record it any way it wants (though later on will clean it up to suit my preferences, eg deleting the shorter visits so that it’s more contiguous), but I also record the hike on my Apple Watch, so that I have a single long workout recording for the full hike.
That also has the benefit of capturing full heart rate and calorie burn data for the hike, which would be missing if only Arc were recording it.