Practice involves several layers for a proper crisis response. What you practice is what you will do under stress. If the practiced techniques are not revisited from time to time, you are setting yourself up to go into a reaction mode rather than a response mode in time of crisis.
Practiced techniques are both physical and mental. Hence, you, the end user, must have a buy in responsibility to taking an active role in both the physical and mental training aspects of techniques you use day-to-day on the job and may be the very core of what will save your life in a critical situation, either on or off duty.
What you practice is what you will do under stress.
Remember what both Lt. Col Dave Grossman and Col. Cooper have taught us about mental awareness and mental crisis rehearsal. Police officers operate, on a normal daily basis, of 90 BPM (heart rate) to 140 BPM depending on the call for service. And we learn to deal with that effectively.
But the minute you cross into a sustained 115-125 BPM you begin to loose fine motor skills.
The minute you move into the 145 BPM and higher you begin to loose the gross motors skills.
And the longer this is sustained and the higher your BPM goes, the more you become a candidate for mental condition black or mental shut down, unless you know specific techniques such as auto-genic breathing and unless you have practiced skills to be used in crises situations.
Again, the skills you want to call upon, in time of crisis, or in our case, in the times when the community or fellow officers most need our help, must be practiced both physically and mentally. You in fact want to convert practiced skills into rituals. It will be those rituals that will save your life or others lives so long as you are practicing the correct skills.
We are all really good at fire drills. Why? Because we practiced them until they became rituals. So why not do this for yourself as someone who chose this profession...