Lightness of touch

This weekend I was giving several individual lessons at my club and one of the moves I was geteting my students to perform was stepping in, engaging my blade in sixte and then reacting to my opening with either an attack down the blade or a disengage on pressure. The one thing that most of them got wrong was the initial step in to engage. They all invariably over-commited and then found the distance was wrong for the atttack. It's another of the essential paradoxes of fencing; in order to attack aggressively you have to be light and relaxed. Too aggressive on your initial movement and you risk telegraphing your attack to your opponent so there should be no difference between a reconnaisance and the actual attack. Sometimes you just have to rein yourself in and relax, which is very difficult to do but worth the effort in the end. I'd like to come up with something profoundly Zen-like at this point such as "to attack, you must give up on the idea of attack" but I can't think of anything adequate...... ;0)