How much class time is dedicated to rolling in your school?
At my gym, we try to spend about a half an hour to forty-five minutes introducing techniques, another half an hour or so doing various drilling with progressive resistance, and the rest of the time rolling. It varies, but I try to give us at least 20 minutes at the end to roll. Then many people stay after class during the week to roll for another half hour or forty-five minutes. I'm experiementing with different formats, but so far this seems to be working.
Jeff
I think that technical instruction show be totally separate and distinct (that is, in a class of its own by itself) from progressive resistance drills and sparring (or "rolling).
This not only shortens class time but also allows one to focus specifically on either mechanics and principles (which is the focus of technical instruction) or movement/precision/body position (which is the essence of drilling) and sparring.
One could split technical instruction and drills/sparring into two different sessions in the same day or make it so that one day's training session is devoted to technical instruction and another day is devoted to drills/sparring.
I personally feel this is the more logical and practical way to do it. If you put them all together in one giant training session, IMHO, one isn't getting as much out of each part as they should because each is only given a portion of time within a larger block of time. Whereas if one were to devote the entire block of time to just one aspect (either technical instruction or drill/sparring) the one is more time devoted to that particular aspect. So instead of getting 1 hour of real time (that is the actual time devoted when calculated) to technical instruction total from the entire week, one would be getting maybe double as much when the add all the session of the week which were devoted specifically to technical instruction. The same can be said about drills/sparring. Overall more quality time is devoted to each aspect BUT less time as a whole is being spent on training in terms of one big block of time.
I think that it´s a good thing to finish the classes with rolling and drilling after some technical instruction. Most peoples brains can only take in a certain amount of details before the brain gets overloaded. It´s also good to get to try out the techs that one learned for real in sparring when they´re still fresh in ones memory...
what if you never roll or spar? is that ok or not?
10 minute warmup
1+ hour of class (technique / drills)
Roll until place closes or exhaustion sets in - can be anywhere up to 2 hours and usually (for me) is.