10/15/2025
STUDENT PROGRESS and the numbers 26 and 52
[Yes...long post... but I promise it's worth the read]
26 and 52- WHY are these numbers important to adaptive/therapeutic riding instructors?
52 = the number of weeks in a year (26 is half of that and youāll see why itās an important number as well by the end of this post).
Before we dig into the numbers:
Have you ever felt like your students are not just progressing āfast enoughā? Do you feel like you have not done āenoughā with them even though you have been teaching them an ENTIRE YEAR!!!! Why in the world canāt they do {insert skill here} after āall this timeā together!?!
Have you ever had your student and/or their parent ask why they are not ārunning around the arena and jumping thingsā after a couple months of lessons because āall their friends are jumping and running and they started lessons at the same time as meā. Sorry (not reallyā¦)for a bit of tongue in cheek humor but Iāve heard questions along these lines more than once in my time teaching.
Have these thoughts or push back from others made you feel like you are failing as an instructor? Like you donāt know what you are doing and maybe you should move on to a different job? Made you question how you progress your students (this is not a bad thing to routinely analyzeā¦.but maybe the thoughts below will help when you do question this)?
Letās try reframing how we look at that āyearā you have spent with the student:
52 = the number of weeks in a year.
Letās say your student comes out for weekly 1 hour lessonsā¦.so then 52 could also equal the number of hours a student could spend in formal lessons. Thatās 52 hours in a total year.
Okā¦52 hours may still seem like āa lotā but letās look at that number differently again:
52 hours is like going to school or work for 8 hours a dayā¦.for 6.5 DAYS! How much can you get done, master, learn, and retain in 6.5 work or school days?
BUTā¦.52 hours is only if your student comes for 1 hourā¦.every weekā¦.they are riding the entire hourā¦.and they donāt miss a single class.
What if we look at a few more factors that can impact that ENTIRE YEAR of 52 hours?
What if the lesson is an hour but the time is split between groundwork and mounted? Letās say itās split 50/50 to make discussion easier.
26 hours is spent doing groundwork and 26 hours is spent in the saddleā¦. In an ENTIRE YEAR!
Thatās like spending 8 hours a day for 3.25 days on unmounted work and 8 hours a day for 3.25 days on mounted work.
What if we factor in holidays to the 52 hours of lessons in a year? Letās take out 4 hours for Thanksgiving/Fall Break, Christmas, New Years, Spring Break/Easter.
What about sickness or travel that happens during those 52 weeks/hours? Letās take out 2 weeks/hours (which is on the SUPER low side)
What about breaks due to weather? I would say on average 8 weeks (2 months) of our year are impacted by weather and we canāt do typical groundwork or mounted lessonsā¦whether you break due to heat (like I do here in AZ) or break for cold or break for moisture.
Soā¦.after we factor in some conservative numbers of lesson hours/weeks missed due to holidays, sickness, travel, weather, etc. We have 52-4-2-8= 38
38 HOURS in an ENTIRE YEAR if your student comes for an entire hour each week and only misses the bare minimum of lessons due to normal factors (do your own math on how many 8 hour days that is).
What if your student only does HALF HOUR lessons each week?
They could accumulate 26 hours in an ETNIRE YEAR if they donāt miss a single lesson.
26 hours is like going to school or work for 8 hours a dayā¦.for 3.25 DAYS! How much can you get done, master, learn, and retain in 3.25 days?
If we factor in weather, sickness, holidays, etc. like we did above then we get 26-2-1-4= 19
19 hours of lessons with conservative break and cancelations factored inā¦19 hours spread out over ENTIRE YEAR.
What if your student only does half hour lessons every other week? (I'm gonna put the math on you on this one again to get you thinking). Side note: The answer to this half hour EOW lesson question is why I only take on students willing to commit to weekly lessons and will not regularly allow siblings to share the same lesson time but alternate weeks. The number of hours in the saddle over a year and the amount of information not retained lessons creates an uphill battle that I personally don't want to fight at this time in my career. I've found it just creates frustration for the student, parent, and instructor.
Back to 26 and 52....
This thought exercise on 26 and 52 does not even begin to factor in the different learning abilities of our students, how much information is lost between lessons, etc.
Students in the Adaptive Riding world often learn at a different pace that what is traditionally accepted as "normal" time to learn a skill in the mainstream lesson world (and the topic of if there really a "normal" or "average" time to learn something in either adaptive or mainstream lessons is a whole separate can of worms).
Whatever way you dice 52 and whatever factors you work in, 52 is still not a huge number when you compare it to the fact that you are teaching a human being with their own unique physical, cognitive and emotional abilitiesā¦.to ride a 1,000lb prey animal with their own unique physical, cognitive, and emotional abilities.
I challenge you to not base how quickly you progress your students and introduce new skills to them on how many WEEKS or MONTHS or YEARS they have been riding or doing groundwork.
I would even challenge you to not even base their progress on number of clock hours in the saddle since each human you work with will progress at their own pace.
YES- Have a general flow of how you progress your students through skillsā¦.but progress them to the next skill based off their ability to perform that thing you are asking of them as independently as possible which may vary for each student [this goes into performance/acute learning vs. true learning/chronic learning which is a whole separate topic].
YES- Push your students to the next level and progress them as much as possible. Challenge yourself to keep growing as an instructor so you can keep progressing your students. But be realistic about how fast someone can learn a new skill.
YES- Practice self-evaluation and regularly look at how and when you progress your students is safe and doing right by them and the horse. Watch how instructors you look up to (because of their quality and safety) progress students. Donāt be tempted to give in to the pressure of what the barn down the road supposedly letās their students do in a couple months out of fear of losing a student.
Challenge yourself to critically analyzing what you can realistically learn in 52ā¦.or 38ā¦..or 26ā¦or 19 hours.
Challenge yourself to prioritize the importance of your students demonstrating true learning and retention of safe, effective equestrian skills.
Good things often take timeā¦.and practiceā¦.and repetition. Learning to be a āgood riderā (and just as important- being a good partner to the horse) takes more than an āENTIRE YEARā of lessonsā¦.
52 & 26- build these numbers into your regular instructor self-reflection time.
52 & 26- share these numbers with other instructors when they are feeling frustrated or baffled at an "ENTIRE YEAR" passing by and wondering if their students have progressed enough in that time.
