'Chargable' attack animations--linking the wind up and hit anims

Hey all,

Basically I’m looking to make chargeable moves where, say for a punch, the character would draw back their arm until a certain point before releasing the punch. The point at which the punch is released would be dictated by the player (hold button to wind up, release to throw out the punch), or by the animation itself when its wind up portion is over. My question is: how can I throw out the punch with the arm starting at the exact spot when the button was released, assuming it’s released before the charging animation finishes naturally?

Attempts to make the question clearer:

In the image above, the position of the elbow in frame 21 (the ‘hit’ portion of the move) would be further back than its position in frame 16, and realistically the twist of the upper body and so on would also be different. What would be the best way to deal with this? I don’t want to ‘cheat’ the animation and skip even more forward into frames where the elbow of step 3 might align with the elbow of step 2, because then I’d have to compare every frame and save this info somewhere. For animations like a spinning kick prepped by the foot moving back along the ground, there may never be a proper match because the foot is already off the ground in frames after wind up is over.

Apologies for the rather convoluted explanation attempts and thanks in advance for any help!

Blend in the start of the AnimMontage would help this a bit…however I’d strongly consider cheating as a ton of fighting/quick twitch games cheat sooooo much…
but adjusting your Blend In time on your punch anim montage would help a lot with the animations going from one to the other without weird inbetween frames…