Yeah I don't see that happening definitely not at 6 seconds and not at 45 seconds. You are doing what most people aren't able to do when talking about the horse stance.
There is more than 45 seconds of valuable information about a horse stance. If you only saying how to get into one, how your feet should be turned and the weight distribution, then you are leaving out tons of information about the horse stance.
Is that information important for students to follow along and start developing the horse stance? How much of that information is going to go in one ear and out the other because they're getting overloaded? Or, for advanced students, how many are going to pay attention to the entire spiel every time you give it?
You could spend 5 minutes explaining it, and then go around checking. Or you can give 10 seconds explaining it, and then go around and check. When you notice something most of them are doing, you fix that thing. Then there's no point in going too much further, because people are only going to remember one or two corrections at a time anyway. If you give them 10 things to fix, by the next class they won't remember any of them, because they'll try to remember it all and get nothing.
Alternatively, if a student asks "why" questions or asks for more detail, you can provide it.
You spend time on it because it's important. There's a right way and a wrong way to do push ups and not everyone does them correctly. Doing push ups the wrong way can cause injury and decrease the benefit of doing push ups.
If it's part of training then that's what we do, regardless of what they can do at home.
Time is a resource. Everything we do in class is important. If you make time for everything, classes will be 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. Proper nutrition is important. Do you eat during class? Proper rest is important. Do you sleep during class?
If you have an hour class, you can spend 5 minutes on warmups and have 55 minutes of class. Or you can spend 20 minutes on warmups and have 40 minutes. I remember one instructor we had for Saturdays who would spend around 40 minutes on warmups. Within 2 months, there were only 3 people taking Saturday class: me and my parents. Why? Too much warmup.
Also, keep in mind that what you consider "warmup", someone else might consider a drill. For example, if you do 20 minutes of punches and kicks and call that a warmup, someone else might call it 20 minutes of class.
It's just so narrow-minded to say "they only do 5 minutes of warmup, it must be a bad school." I can just as easily turn around and say "you spend too much time on warmup. It's to pad your class time because you don't know enough to fill a whole hour."
You see how easy it is to spin "they train different" into "they train bad"?
The width of this horse stance is too wide by most MA systems standard. Most MA systems use "shoulder width + 2 fists distance" to define the proper width of a horse stance. Most wrestlers prefer to use "shoulder width" for their horse stance.
What's your source on this? What you describe is a narrow horse stance. I've never heard of a wrestler training a horse stance, either. (And I did take wrestling in school).
There is a way that you tell your students and they will believe you. This doesn't take too much time to achieve. IMO, the best way is to let your students to test and draw conclusion by themselves.
This is why it takes more time to explain to your students the proper width of the horse stance.
- When your feet are touching, you have weak balance. Any foot sweep from outside can destroy your balance.
- When your feet move apart, your balance will increase.
- There is a point that if you keep moving your feet apart, your balance will get weaker. Any leg spring from inside can destroy your balance.
You have to let your students to go through this kind of testing in order to convince themselves what's the best horse stance width.
A: Dear teacher! What's the proper width for a horse stance?
B: Try to stand in many different width horse stance. let your opponent to sweep your foot from outside, and also to spring your foot from inside, you then draw the conclusion yourself what's the best width for a horse stance.
A: That will require too much testing time.
B: You only have to test it once and you will convince yourself for the rest of your life.
If the students are supposed to figure this out themselves, then why bother spending 5 minutes describing it? Even if you describe it the way you're describing it, it shouldn't add more than 15 seconds or so to explain "You want your feet double shoulder width apart; if your feet are too close, you'll topple easy, but if they're too far apart you lose out on speed and power."
If students need more of an explanation, that can come later (once they've understood the basics).
And yes, I find that for white belts, quite often explaining the "why" of everything is a bit much. You're taking time away from drilling for lecture. And at this point, they're getting so overloaded with information they can't absorb it all anyway. Give more detail if it's asked for, but as a beginner, if you spend 5 minutes explaining the horse stance, most beginners are going to get bored, because they're not training.
For example:
- T: You want your feet double shoulder width, knees bent over your feet, toes pointed straight. (1)
- S: Why do we have our feet this far apart?
- T: For optimum balance, speed and power. (2)
- S: What do you mean?
- T: If your feet are too close, you're easy to trip. If your feet are too far, you don't have the control for balance or power. (3)
- S: What do you mean?
- T: Try it out and see. (4)
For a beginner, Line 1 is often enough. They can follow along with the training. If they want to know more, then Line 2 usually sufficient. It describes the purpose of that metric. Most people don't need (or even want) to know every detail. They want to know enough to meet their goal. But if they don't understand it, they'll continue asking. That's why the explanation gets more detailed further on.
Time is a resource. Your student's attention span and memory retention are also resources. If you spend too much time on the details, there won't be any time left to actually practice.