I am an adult. Starting from no knowledge A trainer told me 100 lessons , at 2 per week . That seems very high to me. I just want to learn the basics. I can learn more advanced stuff later.
I guess it depends on what you define as basics. I grew up with some family that owned horses (these were not fancy horses, these were blue collar rural people that kept pretty serviceable but relatively cheap stock horses), and rode a lot as a teenager into my early 20s. None of us involved had formal lessons at all.
You learn how to mount, and make a horse stop and go day 1, basically the first time you ride. I think if this trainer is talking about having any real “equestrian skill”, sure 100 lessons in a year might be what it takes. But I don’t agree it takes anywhere near that to learn enough to take a horse out for a casual trail ride. I don’t want to make it sounds simplistic, it’s good to get comfortable with horses and knowledgeable about them, there’s a ton that goes with it. But literally just the bare minimum of knowing how to get onto, off of, and how to make a horse stop and go should be learned before you’re ever set loose on one.
When I was a teenager, I learned the basics in just a few minutes: How to get on and off the horse, how to stop, how to go, how to turn left / right (which I also had to learn the difference between plow reined and neck reined, since these horses were neck reined). After about 15 minutes going around the farm to make sure everyone had the hang of it, we went for about a 2 hour trail ride.
FWIW, these were working farm horses. The family that owned them were friends.
I grew up across the street from mom & pop lumber magnates who kept a couple of horses on their property. I didn’t ride much but my sisters sure did!
As the others said, learning the basics is really easy. So is retaining the basics: I still remembered how years later when my dad’s company held their annual picnic in an area with horse rentals & trails.
Starting with a trained, obedient, calm horse, you can master the art of stopping, starting, and turning in less than an hour. That’s because all you are doing is crudely signaling to a sentient being who is trying to figure out what you are asking.
There are two sets of “basics” – staying on, while at minimum not interfering with your horse’s balance or hurting them, and learning how to cue your horse to do what you want. The first is athleticism – often athletes in other sports learn how to do this quickly. The other is communicating with another species. For most people, this is a lifetime journey. Horses are not machines. They are not designed by or for humans, but for themselves. They read your emotions through their skin.
What’s your goal? Do you want to be able to go out on a trail ride with a friend who knows how to ride, keeping the horses mostly at a walk? Do you want to be able to train horses to do complicated things? Something in between?
Like others, i have done a lot of trail rides with minimal instruction. A friend and i rented horses for two hours and went riding around a Pennsylvania state park.
But … A lot of it depends on the horse. The horse needs to “read” the rider. A well trained horse that is trying to cooperate is easy to ride. A cranky, uncooperative horse that isn’t very good at reading the rider is much harder.
I once rented a horse that spent the first ten minutes trying to scrape me off it’s back. I took it back to the stable (which it was happy to do) and got a different one. There’s no way i could have made that horse do stuff it didn’t want to do. At the other extreme, i once rented the owner’s polo pony at a ring. I swear it was trying to show off to me just how well it could read me. If i looked in a direction, it went that way. It trotted, jumped, and returned to a walk at a mild suggestion. It was a joy to ride, and i don’t think you’d have needed much training for that to be true.
It was easy enough to learn when I was a kid. How to mount and dismount, how the use the reins.
At one point, I also learned how to use an English saddle. Not much different, but you need to know how to post.
We had horses when I was a kid, and I don’t recall much more than a few minutes of ‘sit like this, this means go, this means stop’ type stuff. Didn’t occur to me that it was supposed to be hard. My parents use to take my sister and I camping with our horses and I would head out on various trails, up and down steep hills and through streams without a moment’s additional thought.
That said, I did eventually take lessons, but they were more about mastering form for \ horse shows and competition. I entered exactly one show, thought it was dumb shit, and never did it again. It became a regular thing for my sister though.
I can’t imagine what you’d possibly need to learn that would take 100 lessons unless you seriously meant to compete. You can rent a horse here in town to take, trail rides in the mountains with exactly zero lessons. I think we’re either missing part of the conversation with the teacher or they’re looking for a steady pay day.
I don’t know horses well enough to fact check myself, but I think one reason we always had a lot of success despite no formal training, is the sort of farm horses we worked with were from horse breeds that were intended to be very docile. A lot of the “working” farm breeds really are bred to be agreeable and not hard to work with. If someone is really into more “exciting” horsemanship, fast riding, doing stunts, complicated maneuvers, the working agricultural breeds really just don’t…do that stuff well, but they tend towards not being mean and feisty.
My more limited exposure to “fancier” horses like thoroughbreds and such is while they could run like a bolt of lightning they were also far more prone to being high strung and difficult.
My guess at least in part is that OP is encountering a horse trainer who mostly rides speedy or athletic breeds that are doing horsemanship trials and things like that, and is thinking in that mindset. That’s really complex horsemanship and likely does take the 100 lessons they were talking about.
Note of course all the horses I’m talking about were broke to harness or saddle, which is a process all horses have to go through, and unless you’re a real horse person you don’t want anywhere near a horse that isn’t broke to those.
I think it is mainly this. I went to a week long horse camp in Monument Valley where a group of us would take our horses out for 8 hours at a time. Not on a trail or single file but more as a pack staying within 50 yards of each other. You were supposed to be a novice to attend but I had never been on a horse. They could probably tell and gave me a very cooperative horse from the get go. I had no problems picking it up quickly and was doing galloping after a couple days.
I had minimal instruction. 3rd time I got on the horse, it took in a big breath. Cinch came loose and saddle turned. I landed on my butt in the dirt.
Learned later they deliberatly blow out their gut. knowing that you can’t cinch tight, sneaky bastards. 
Never let a horse run towards a tree. They knock you off their back with a low limb. Or they run towarda the barn. You better jump off before your head hits the door jam. Don’t ask me how I know.
I wisely stopped riding in my teens before getting badly hurt.
Real fancy riding does require learning technique and taking lessons.
So…The basics of learning to ride a horse - that’s one thing.
I’ve always wondered about something similar. Judging from the pictures of novices climbing down from horses on their first ride, and then walking away VERY SLOWLY, bent over and bowlegged, how long does it take to toughen up enough to enjoy an extended ride?
In my experience from my youth if I had gone more than a few months without riding then started up again, I’d be sore after a ride until I had ridden for maybe 4-5 times within the same couple of weeks or so.
I think there’s two phenomena for normal riding–one is you get saddle sores, that can be prevented by just knowing how to properly be positioned in the saddle and wearing appropriate clothing, making sure you aren’t getting your skin irritated by friction.
The other is just basically the same sort of muscular pain you probably get anytime you use your muscles in specific ways they aren’t used to being used. You use muscles in your thigh, hip, and back quite a bit when riding, to guide the horse and stabilize your body on it. There really, in my experience, isn’t anything that quite hits these muscles in the same way, so when you first ride, you’re going to get sore. The more you ride, the less it happens.
At least in my personal life that’s how my body has always worked. I’m a lifetime gym guy, specifically for barbell lifting 3ish times a week, but I would still have soreness in my back, legs, arms etc a day or so after helping a friend move houses with lots of heavy furniture moving. It wasn’t that I wasn’t in shape or wasn’t strong, but lifting a barbell isn’t the same as lifting a couch or an armoire and carrying it up 2 flights of stairs. I assume professional movers get adapted to it, but the rest of us usually are going to be a bit worn out and sore from moving furniture when we don’t do it normally.
Thank you. Now I understand why the Hitchcock film Marnie has the statement “The best thing for the inside of a person is the outside of a horse.”
I’ve been riding for over 35 years and still take lessons. Granted, I ride upper level dressage. Anyone can sit on a horse’s back, especially a school or trail horse, and go for a walk. But if you want to learn to control a horse with your hands, legs, and seat, you need lessons. There is no set amount of time or lessons. It’s not “after 6 lessons, you can enter a show.” Riding is like any other sport. You can do it not very well, you can be average, or you can get into it. Your choice.
Climb on top of a creature with metal feet and big teeth? No thanks!
The trick to learn with horses, is within the first minute of mounting. Especially for beginners.
You and the horse need to agree who is in control. Sometimes it will be you. Sometimes it will be the horse.
If it turns out to be the horse, then accept that, or dismount and find another horse.
some of that might be lessons on the care and feeding of a horse too …
There’s more to riding than a basic understanding of start and stop, although that’s important.
There’s this sort of knowledge, of animal behavior.
There’s muscle toughness too.
There’s also staying on the horse if something happens, and it will. Horses are live animals, not cars. They react to things, and you need to react to them and to anticipate them. Falling off a horse is not fun.
All that said, 100 hours seems high to me for basic competency, but I don’t know what you discussed exactly.
If someone comes to visit and wants to ride, I’ll saddle up Jake and with a fifteen minute lesson they can be exploring the woods. They’ll think they know how to ride.
If they return at some time for another ride that’s great. If I want to point out how little they truly know, I’ll saddle up Gracie and destroy their overconfident state.