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.

Are goaltenders really “wired differently”?
Are defensemen calmer by nature?
Are forwards inherently more volatile?

In this episode of the Coretex Athletic Review, I examine a peer-reviewed study that puts long-standing hockey stereotypes under the microscope—not by testing performance or brain activity, but by exploring how players perceive each other.

Using a social-psychology lens, this episode looks at whether perceived personality differences between hockey positions reflect true dispositional differences—or whether they are products of role demands, social identity, and in-group bias.

• Why hockey positions function as powerful social categories

• The Big Five personality framework and how it’s used in sport psychology

• How players rate themselves versus how they rate positions

• Common stereotypes associated with forwards, defensemen, and goaltenders

• Evidence of in-group bias across positions

• Why perceived differences are stronger than actual personality differences

• How coaches may unintentionally confuse role demands with personality traits

The strongest differences weren’t found in who players are—but in how players see each other.

This episode is less about proving stereotypes right or wrong, and more about understanding how they form, why they persist, and how they influence coaching, communication, and athlete development.

Personality Traits and Stereotypes Associated with Ice Hockey Positions
Cameron, J. E., Cameron, J. M., Dithurbide, L., & Lalonde, R.
Published in Journal of Sport Behavior (2012)

Elite sport moves fast.

Athletes can be central figures in their sport one season and largely absent from the competitive conversation only a few years later. This episode explores what happens not just after sport ends, but what is quietly happening during an athlete’s prime that shapes how difficult the transition becomes.

Using a recent doctoral dissertation by Amanda Workman-Vickers (2025, West Texas A&M University), this episode examines how collegiate athletes experience the transition from being an athlete to becoming something else — and why that transition is often destabilizing without being pathological.

• The fleeting nature of status in elite sport

• Why performance often becomes a primary source of self-worth before retirement

• The concept of identity limbo

• Why sadness and gratitude frequently coexist during transition

• The importance of natural vs abrupt career endings

• How simple exit meetings can provide meaningful closure

• Study type: Qualitative, phenomenological doctoral dissertation

• Participants: 10 NCAA Division II athletes

• Sports represented: Football, basketball, baseball/softball, track & field

• Career endpoint: All athletes exhausted eligibility or graduated

Rather than framing retirement as a mental health crisis, this study highlights how identity destabilization often reflects a mismatch between the speed of high-performance systems and the slower pace of human identity adaptation.

Most athletes don’t break when sport ends.
But when performance has been doing identity work for years, the sudden loss of feedback, structure, and role clarity can leave athletes temporarily unanchored.

This episode is not a critique of sport systems — it’s an examination of how they function, and how athletes experience the transition when the system inevitably moves on.

Host: Evan Kurylo
Podcast: Coretex Athletic Review
Release Schedule: Weekly — Thursdays at 6:00 AM MST