Like ridin a bike?

[sanfranciscian]

Question I have been curious about, While I certainly have no intention or desire at this moment. What has been your experience when you stop using a straight for a prolonged amount of time. Have you noticed any significant decrease of your skills, or more of a just kind of rusty and need a few shaves to get back going thing. I am assuming the latter. My experience with a couple of my Youthful passions Golf,skiing has been that say with golf i know that if i tee it up i am going to shoot 88-98 range possibly a few more, but the 78 is definitely out of the question, as even at the top of my game i had to devote a considerable amount of time to practice to stay there. with skiing it is more of an just out of shape and lost my strength and endurance issue, and not as muscle memory demanding as golf. Though both of those endeavors probably are (x) amount reliant on the game played between the ears. See any parallels here? Thanks in advance for any insight into another of my early Saturday inane thoughts.

Ian

[rajagra]

I've spent most of this year using DEs but recently gone back to straights. Some of the shaves were terrible. I thought I'd ruined all my blades with bad honing, but I stuck to one and now everything is going well again, better than ever in fact. It didn't take a vast number of shaves to relearn, but it did need to be done.

I think some heavy stropping improved the blade, but that can't fully explain the transformation from WTG passes that removed no hair, to getting wonderful shaves.

[Banjoman]

I use DEs daily and straights on the weekend. My straight technique seems to stay consistant after 5 days on DE duty except for speed. But then again slow and steady with a straight is safer! Still I am getting satisfactory results with my straights.

[jss4fish]

I am still in the learning phase but getting consistent DFS ( a couple months in). This week I had to get out the door early and went back to the DE for speed. This mornings shave was one of the better ones as far as speed and quality. I can't explain it but the short break seemed to relax my technique. Hopefully it is like ridding a bike, but I am gonna assume a lengthy purgatory of pain if I walk away for too long and stick with the straights :)

[volleykinginnc]

I've spent the last year shaving with a straight exclusively but last week was on vacation for 6 days where I used a DE. Came back to the straight and the first one I felt almost like the very first time I shaved with a straight. I couldn't believe it. Anyway, 2 shave later I'm back where I was.

I didn't think it possible to lose my techinque so quickly but I did.

[YetiDave]

I skipped a few days when I was at away at a festival and nearly sliced myself to ribbons, however I'm not sure whether that was due to the huge amounts of alcohol still in my system from the festival...

[Brent]

I haven't skipped more than a day or two but there was a similar post a few weeks ago where the user also needed a fair amount of time to get back on track. It probably won't be like starting off new all over again but it'll probably take some time to get it back