Help Trying to find Rhythm in combos/knowing when to press the input during the combo

Recently in my training to get better at Tokon I’ve been doing the Combo Trials on Leverless for some of my fav characters to play as and for the most part I’ve done well. But there’s just one part of every combo I for the life of me cannot do it’s the air combos, more specifically jump cancel and mix up attacks.

An example would be one part when your doing a combo trial for Magik and in the combo your required to do Jump > 5H > 6H > jump > 5H > 6H > 6H, and I have such an incredible hard time pulling it off and I’ve figured out that my main issue is that I button mash during combos. I’ve discussed my issue for button mashing here before but what I wanted to explain is that I button mash during combo trials because I don’t know the exact time when to press the input to string the attacks together, and when I don’t know when the input should be pressed during the combo I just mash the button hoping it comes. And that not only leads to air combo difficulty but combo attacks in general because I rely on button mashing when not knowing the exact time I need to press it.

One day on Twitter however I saw someone posted saying something along the lines of “fighting games are secretly rhythm games”. They said this meaning when doing combos it’s basically to doing a difficult part of the song, mastery of timing being required to get through it and understanding when to press the input because obviously you don’t button mash during rhythm songs.

And that’s what I’ve been trying to do as of late, trying to figure out the timing of when to to press the input during combos and not button mashing hoping it comes out, doing combos like I’m playing a note on an instrument. But obviously there isn’t one rhythm for the whole game, I understand each character with each their own different combos that the “rhythm” Is completely different, which is probably why I’m having difficulty finding an answer to my problem.

So I wanted to ask on if there was an easier way to figure out the rhythm of combos and how to figure out exactly when you should hit the input during the combo sequence so I can easier avoid button mashing and make things much cleaner and easier for me.