We often hear that “you never forget how to ride a bike.”But in sport, that saying hides an important qualifier.
In this episode of the Coretex Athletic Review, Evan Kurylo examines a recent 2025 meta-analytic review on procedural skill retention and decay to explore what actually happens to athletic skills during periods of non-use or intermittent use.
Rather than asking whether skills disappear, the research asks a more precise question: which aspects of performance are most vulnerable when a skill isn’t being used regularly?
The answer turns out to be less about forgetting and more about loss of precision, consistency, and calibration.
Why common sayings (like “the customer is always right” or “you never forget how to ride a bike”) often lose important qualifiers over time
What procedural skills are — and why they differ from simply “knowing” something
What a large-scale meta-analysis can (and cannot) tell us about skill retention
Evidence that procedural skills are retained, but not static
Why accuracy and precision are more vulnerable than raw execution or speed
How patterns of use matter more than time passing alone
A cautionary note on skill scaling — why retained skills may still need recalibration as strength, speed, or body size changes
Why offseason decisions depend heavily on goals, context, and training culture
Procedural Skill Retention and Decay (2025)A meta-analytic review published by the American Psychological AssociationAuthors: Christopher Tatel & Philip Ackerman
This paper synthesizes findings from hundreds of studies across sport, medical training, military tasks, transportation, and laboratory motor learning to model how procedural skill performance changes following periods of non-use or intermittent use.
Procedural skills don’t simply disappear when practice stops.What changes first is how precisely and consistently those skills are expressed — and, in many sports, whether they’re still appropriately scaled to the athlete’s current physical system.
Retention is not the same as readiness.
The Coretex Athletic Review examines one piece of research per episode and breaks it down without hype, prescriptions, or shortcuts.
New episodes release every Thursday at 6:00 a.m. Mountain Time.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or watch on YouTube.Coretex Goaltender Development is currently rebranding to Coretex Athletics, continuing its focus on goaltender development while expanding into athletic research and education.
