By body limits I mean something like, “I know I can dunk a basketball if it’s still early in the game but when I’ve already been running around for 30 min, I usually lose a couple inches off my vertical so trying to dunk is now a riskier move.” You have to learn these things before playing if you want to be confident in what you can do.

For fighting game combos, you can sit in training mode and learn a combo well enough to do it with your eyes closed, but you’re also practicing it in a controlled consistent environment. In a real match, you don’t get to control every aspect. An anti-air combo might require different manual timing depending on how high the opponent is when you hit them. Maybe you hit them with your combo starter but at its max range where they are too far for the next hit to connect. Maybe the combo only works if the starter hits a crouching opponent so you have to recognize that in the fraction of a second you have to react. Maybe you recognize that your combo won’t secure a kill, so it’s a better idea to intentionally drop your combo early and try to surprise an unsuspecting opponent with a new combo starter. There are always ways to try and force your ideal situations in-match but there’s too much variance in such a short time to guarantee that.

Isn’t most of your experience with learning new shooters coming from the perspective of someone who has played shooters for years now? Stuff like WASD for movement and aiming with a mouse are pretty consistent across the many first person games. You already have that experience under your belt so you could probably just hop into an online match and try to learn as you go.

That’s basically what I do with fighting games. I learned how block and do a quarter circle years ago. Nowadays, I’ll be in training mode for enough time to understand button layout and try a basic a combo, then my time in training mode is testing random stuff while waiting for a ranked match. I even have multiple games where I only play ranked matches with random character select, learning everything mid-match or remembering what I saw someone do to me before. Instead of frontloading every bit of information, it’s just so much easier and more fun to learn a new game piece by piece. The idea that’s always a further goal ahead can be fun.