The four golden rules of preparation

There are four things you need to be able to do in order to be able to launch an attack properly and have it hit.

1.      Execute preparation properly

Obviously you’re going to have problems if you can’t put two footwork motions together without falling on your face, or if your feints are weak and your opponent never believes them. You don’t necessarily need a huge vocabulary of preparation techniques, but you need to be able to execute the ones you know reasonably well.

2.      Recognize a one-tempo situation

Launching an attack in a one-tempo situation gets a touch. Launching an attack outside of a one-tempo situation doesn’t get you a touch (in fact, you probably get hit yourself). So clearly it’s important to be able to quickly assess all the factors that contribute to the situation and come up with a reasonably accurate answer to the question, “Do I have a one-tempo situation right now?” If you can’t do this, you’re essentially attacking at random times, and you’ll get random results. Since one-tempo situations are rarer than non-one-tempo situations, you’ll probably get mostly bad results.

Incidentally, though outside the scope of this article, which is targeted at the attacker’s viewpoint, it’s equally important to be able to judge whether the current situation is one-tempo for your opponent, and avoid such situations.

3.      Launch as soon as you have a one-tempo situation

One-tempo situations don’t last very long. Once you detect one, you have to be able to launch immediately, before it’s gone. You also need to execute the launch properly (hand before feet, good lunge, etc.).

4.      Don’t launch if you don’t have a one-tempo situation

If your opponent doesn’t cooperate with your preparation, then when you finish a preparation sequence you don’t have a one-tempo situation. Therefore you need the ability to not launch an attack if you detect that you don’t have a one-tempo situation. The ability to not attack when the time is not right is probably even more important than the ability to attack when the time is right.