Think about it in this way: where are the stops? When you see the stops going off, you want to be ready to take advantage, and have your own stop in place in case you are wrong.
The terminology seems quaint, but the mental picture is this: If you want to jump across a river (or creek), you need to back away from the riverbank and then run toward it to get up enough speed to make the jump. Similarly, if you want to break through the ice, you need to jump up high enough so that you land with adequate force to break through. The idea is that price action at bottoms and tops has a slingshot-like quality...you have to pull the slingshot back in order to propel the projectile forward with enough force to reach the target.
The speed and magnitude of the move off of the prospective bottom or top is critical. If there is no bounce, then the support will probably not hold.
Does this strictly apply to a range bound market....stops get triggered through a price spike, right before reversing through to the other side of the range....thereby reinforcing the range? Or is it fractal across the board, for tops and bottoms in general?