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When I first got my dad's old 1911 after he died, it came with a couple of magazines loaded with lead round nose cartridges that were old enough that the brass has a greenish tinge and the lead looked a little......well.....old. Anyway, that ammo might well have dated back to immediately post WW2, since my dad brought the pistol home from the war. As far as I know, he never fired that gun again after the war. Anyway, a couple of friends of mine took me to the range to teach me how to shoot. I emptied the cartridges out of magazines, wiped them down with a rag to take some of the green off, loaded them back up and fired them. They went bang, just like they're supposed to.

I'm not a fanatic about it. I probably shoot my carry ammo once a year in each of my carry guns. But like SRO1911, I have several carry pistols, so realistically, it might be longer than a year for each gun. I don't really pay much attention to it. I'll fire a magazine to verify POA/POI and to reacquaint myself with the recoil characteristics for that particular loading, and then I tend to forget about it. Since I have carry weapons in .45 (X3), 9mm (X1), and .357 magnum (X1), I've gotten to where I don't pay that much attention to the differences between calibers, or to the differences between loads within a caliber—particularly at likely self-defense distances.

Edited to add: The above refers to pistols. With my rifles I practice copiously with the ammo I am most likely to use in them.