Class duration - how long is too long, and how short is too short?

When Eastern martial arts were introduced to the West, the typical class was 90 minutes long, sometimes 2 hours.

Martial Arts schools were few and far between, and most only offered 2 or 3 classes a week. So, the class duration reflected this to justify the long travel many people had to make to attend training and maximise the opportunity to train when only a few weekly classes were available.

The longer class duration also allowed for a decent warm-up/stretching session and everything else that needed to be covered.

Nowadays, the most common time frame for an adult class is 60 minutes. One-hour classes started to appear quite a long time ago. I remember my instructor trying to shorten our 90-minute classes to one hour in the late 1980s. But he got pushback from us because he only offered three classes a week. Seeing our four and a half hours of weekly training shortened significantly to three hours did not sit well with us.

The one-hour class has advantages in today's time-poor world. Many students have limited spare time from working longer hours and having other commitments that keep them busy—that is also true, as the world now seems to work in 60-minute blocks.

The problem with a 60-minute class is that some aspect of a more extended class has to go. This is usually the fitness/stretching component. Granted, as martial arts instructors, we don't usually handle it to make our students fit and flexible, but this is required for safe and effective martial arts training. Hence, we need to ensure that if we don't cover it, the student takes responsibility for it. Most don't, so what tends to happen is that the entire content of a 90-minute class gets compressed into a 60-minute format, which means that some aspects of the class get glossed over or that the time between gradings takes a bit longer. Sixty minutes is an ideal time for a specialist class like kata/self-defence or sparring.

45-minute and 30-minute classes are also fairly common these days.

These are best for children and consider the limited attention spans of the various age groups. For older children (7 years or more), 45 to 60 minutes seems relatively standard. However, some schools now offer classes to younger children, and keeping them focused in a 45 to 60-minute class can take some work. Hence, the ideal class duration for the 3—to 6-year-old age group is now widely considered to be around 30 minutes.

If a school owns or rents its dedicated premises, it is common to see a range of class times in its weekly timetable. This allows the school to target other age groups and offer a range of specialist classes in addition to their core martial arts class.  

These days, for the average person, a 60-minute class seems ideal, and most schools now offer the 60-minute class as their standard offering. However, call me old-fashioned, but I still prefer the 90-minute class!