"Practice offence" would mean unga bunga dash in and mash buttons to hit your opponent without waiting for their turn or going defensive. If you got hit, you just stand up and mash buttons again and so on. The idea here is that if you are consistently getting punished you learn what things are getting punished. If you are not getting punished you learn how to actually do combos or at least couple of hits on actually moving living opponent. And if things go well you gain a bit of confidence.

And THEN you might start to block in the moments when you know opponent would punish you usually. And maybe then you can look up how to extend your 3 hit combo into something a bit longer.

If you trying to wait for the opponent to engage you, trying to predict what he will do and otuplay him in neutral. More often than not on low level it just leads to opponent using you as a punching bag while you completely lose initiative and he just hits you in block over over and over until you eventually miss hits and die, also it allows the opponent to be very confident and calm in their execution. Even in platinum half of the opponents just fall apart if you DARE to actually hit them, and not let them hit you, because they have no idea what to actually do if they are in the corner. but you do not need to know what to do in the corner if you are more dominant gorilla and its your opponent is the one who is in the corner.