Actually there are quite a few ways. One really good one, though, is to stop every eleven bars to say something uninspiring about playing the staccatos shorter, starting the crescendos quieter, using softer sticks for the timpani, or any of the other dozens of things that good musicians will figure out for themselves once they've got a bit of an overview.
You do this mostly to cover up for having stopped because it fell apart due to your lack of clarity; not daring to draw attention to this by either apologising or attempting to blame the players, you try to act like you stopped for something else. Already made uncomfortable by this failure, you start to obsess that the players are watching you like hawks and noticing your ineptitude with the grim relish of a connoisseur sending back corked wine, which they are. Never all that secure about your conducting to begin with, this latest confirmation of your self-doubt makes you unable to do the simplest thing; you can't give a clear upbeat and even if you do you aren't sure the tempo you hear is the one you meant, or if the one you meant was even right anyway, and maybe the orchestra misread you because they have a different tempo in their heads, and maybe in fact they're right and you were imagining it wrong, and all this self-analysis when you should be concentrating on listening to the rehearsal makes you lose concentration and you realise you've had to stop again, but you were so busy thinking about what had gone wrong with the upbeat that you haven't been listening and can't think of anything to correct, and you look down at the score trying to find a commonplace mistake that you weren't sure if it was wrong but somebody probably did play it wrong somewhere and even if they didn't they might do next time, and on you go, making it worse and worse. And you can practically hear them asking each other, 'why is this guy conducting us', and well, hell, why wouldn't you hear it, everyone else can. As you pick a place to start two bars further forward than the previous time so it feels like you're making progress and count out the measures for the orchestra, you see out of the corner of your eye that the normally docile woodwind players are exchanging looks, and you try to tell yourself it's a private joke that has nothing to do with this rehearsal but you remember your own days playing in an orchestra and you know that isn't true.
Well, we've all been there, conductors and players alike, and knowing what it feels like from the other side I have more sympathy than it sounds like just now. But although the reasons outlined above account for most of the first-rehearsal stopping, and actually most conductors doing this know perfectly well that the most productive thing would be to crash through with only the most critical stops, they do still sometimes forget that and manage to convince themselves that talking to the orchestra is useful. Orchestral players know that it isn't. And it certainly isn't when the players haven't got any idea of the music yet. Why not?
It seems to me that we are wired up to learn music (and other things) in a way that resembles the appearance of a Google Maps image loading on a slow smartphone. Very blurry at first, then kind of pixellated with some patches of green visible, then suddenly the hit of satisfaction as the image rights itself and sharpens up. And you know also how while it's loading the phone is apt to freeze if you try to drag the map an inch or two to the side, but once it's got the area loaded into the memory you can drag, zoom in, zoom out, search for the closest place to buy charcoal or display all the bus stops served by night buses and the phone will keep up with your impatient fingers, gliding effortlessly through hyperinformatic space. (If you're reading this in a couple of years' time and can't believe people used to struggle through life with technology this deficient, imagine how I feel.)
So, but this is what learning music is like. You can't find the shortest route from ATM to off-licence until you've got the whole picture loaded. It is most especially not like pictures used to download in early versions of Netscape c. 1992, a beautifully defined strip of sky, followed by a perfect treetop, eventually a few strands of hair at the top of the tallest person in the picture's head, and an eternity later, legs, feet, ground. (Probably what changed this is that the men writing the software for these browsers thought about the kind of pictures they most often wanted to look at on the internet and realised it was not in their interests to spend their then-precious bandwidth allowances on the detailed image of people's head-tops before you knew whether you liked what you were getting much lower down in the picture.) Music cannot be learned this way. You can only get to the detail by going through the overview; you just need to play something through a few times, eventually things start to click into place. Conductors who understand this and just let you play get results much faster.
It's getting late and I have another rehearsal to look forward to tomorrow morning so I have to stop writing pretty soon but just one further thought. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about whether or not you're a musician; we've all experienced that feeling of not really knowing enough about something to make any connections, the sense that reading another article on the same topic will just double your overall understanding of it from nothing to nothing, the questioning whether you will every really actually get the thing enough to really be comfortable with it like other people seem to be. But equally you will know what I mean that at some point things just click somehow and it all does make sense, and not only does the next thing someone tells you about the topic seem to make complete sense, but it connects with something else you remember hearing about it that at the time you thought wasn't going in at all because it didn't really seem to mean anything, and then someone asks you to explain it to them and all of a sudden you find that you are doing that and sounding rather well-informed.
Well but then the brain must be able to store an incredible amount of not-yet-connected pre-knowledge long before it's in a position to make sense of it. That feeling you get when you listen to a piece of music for the twelfth time and you can hear what phrase is going to come next before it does, even if someone turned the player off, it only comes after quite a few playings. After the first time - with hard music, anyway - you would not be able to complete any phrases like that, or remember any of how the music goes 15 minutes after listening to it. You feel just as if you'd never heard it at all. And yet something has just remained, because you are still one-twelfth of the way to the point where you will be hearing it, and after the second time - when you still may not be able to remember how any of it goes - you will be one-sixth. I find this incredible. I do not find it difficult to accept that my brain can store a lot of information that I have access to and can marshall in a conscious way. But that my brain can also be storing a whole load of information that I can't get at and can't in any way sense is there, but that will at some point with the right sensory inputs be movable into this active conscious domain - I find that amazing.
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