What happens to your skills when you don’t practice them?
I’m supposed to tell you that they atrophy, and that’s not false. Hans von Bülow said, “If I stop practice for one day, I notice it in my playing; if I stop two days, my friends notice it; if I stop three days, the public notices it.” (His is the oldest attribution of many).
But that’s not always true. I suppose eventually my bread baking skills would atrophy, but I can reliably not bake for a couple of months and still have my bread come out perfectly, from memory.
Some skills are so practiced, they’re rock solid. At that point, practice is only very rarely needed to maintain.
I salute my high school math teachers that I am still able to handle most high school math (geometry, algebra, trig) without too much trouble; when I hear students say that they forgot everything over the summer, I figure that their skills must not have been rock solid.
That’s the goal, then: practice so diligently that your skills don’t measurably change even if you take a few weeks off.