Apple Watch Ultra question

I changed the action button on my watch to activate the voice recorder, and pressing it makes the watch start recording immediately. I would hope that a workout would behave the same way. I used to have mine set up for workouts when I first got the watch, but for my needs, immediate access to voice recorder is a lot more important. I hope others will be able to answer your question more accurately with actual workout info.

Dave,

This is one of the reasons I own an apple watch altra. I have mine to open the work out app on first press, double tapping starts an in door walk. Very handy.
To stop the workout, is a bit more of a problem.

Siri? Did you ask her to start it? Thought you could. Long live cats and down with apple.

I too have my Action Button set to start a Voice Memo recording, but it can be configured to enable other actions and even switch between actions by long-pressing. Shortcuts may be another option, as the Action Button can also be used to activate them. Since the Start Workout and Stop Workout are available from the Fitness app on iOS, it might be possible to create a script to toggle between these two actions that can be assigned to the Action Button on Apple Watch, but I am not entirely sure exactly what is and is not possible to do with Shortcuts on Apple Watch since not all shortcuts are compatible with it and Shortcuts is a feature that I only use very lightly and sporadically (on macOS I use AppleScript directly when I need that kind of automation).

Personally I agree with Holger Fiallo here, in that this is one situation in which just asking Siri gets the job done, as I confirmed completely by accident while searching fork a Workout app on iOS which is in fact called Fitness.

I had no idea that we were able to modify functionality of long press of the action button. I thought that was only for the siren, which I have never used. If this is an option, though, I'm going to change it right away. I've always been slightly worried about triggering the siren accidentally, so this would eliminate that concern nicely. Thanks for teaching me something new.

If you disable the Siren activation by long-press in Settings -> Action Button, you can enable the Quick Switch menu with all the applications and shortcuts that you wish to make available when you long-press the Action Button. The Quick Switch menu does not activate anything by itself, it only switches whatever is assigned to normally pressing the Action Button at any given moment.

I have both quick switch menu and siren enabled. It’s not if you disable siren the quick switch menu becomes available; both can be on at once. If you hold the action button for about half a second to 1.5 seconds, haven't actually measured exact timing but, you'll feel a hactic, let go and you'll be brought to the quick switch actions menu. Hold it for longer and yeah this will trigger the siren. Not sure for how long as haven't tried it yet, but if I had to take a guess, 3 to 5 seconds probably, but disabling the siren has nothing to do with having quick switching on or off, both can be on at once, as I said above. It’s the same thing that happens with the side button. press it once, you'll be taken to the control centre, Hold it for about 2, 4 seconds, you'll feel a hactic and if you let go, you'll be in the power off, emergency sos etc menu where you can power off the wwatch. Hold it for longer than 4 seconds, it'll, assuming you have sos enabled, automatically start a countdown calling emergency services. Same thing as what you see with the action button, press once you'll trigger the selected action, press and hold for about a second, quick switch menu, press for longer, siren.
Edit, speaking of the siren... Once it goes off... How do you turn it off? I mean, given that its blasting via the speaker... If you have to doubletap on the play button, can this be done? Can you still hear voiceover? Or can you stop it by putting a palm over the face of the watch like you do to mute other notifications? Via pressing a button I.e, crown etc? I mean if its only pressing the, stop button that, for a voiceover user seems quite... counter intuitive, can one actually hear voiceover while the siren is sounding? Might not be a bad idea to send a feature suggestion to apple to add alternative ways of making the siren stop if one cant hear voiceover. I still have to try it to see what's what but this seems like tmore stop methods for the siren should've been implemented, i.e, physical ones like holding the crown, or action button etc.

The siren will pause periodically and isn't continuous, so turning it off is pretty easy.
The There will be a "stop siren" button which you should be in the foreground since activating the siren opens the siren app.

Since, for some reason, they made it possible to delete the siren, I did that to be on the safe side, but now that I actually understand how it works, I may try to reinstall it at some point.

Your welcome. If you want to reinstall, go to app store on the watch search for siren and you'll be able to reinstall it.
I'm actually curious though. Deleting the siren app, the app is, to my understanding, only a shortcut. So if you delete said shortcut or app; in theory you should still be able to trigger it via the action button even if the app is uninstalled.