What is it like to be a trained martial artist and have an untrained person on the street want to fight you?

The first absolute rule is to walk away from any stranger wanting a fight.  better still run.  You simply do not know what he is actually capable of and there are so many options that you probably getting hurt is and in fact has become more so as so many today have  the rudiments of martial training.  It takes thirty minutes of instruction to be shown several useful methods, even if you completely lack training.

Remember a simple thumb to the eye will really put him out of sorts the instance your opponent actually moves out of balance or moves at all.  It will not stop you from getting hurt but will cause an initial back off.

 Here we have something much more deadly that i personally was not aware off.  It is obviously very effective.  However a truly well trained expert will have a stack of such moves to pick from.  That alone should keep you from taking on a trained person.  And that stranger may well know enough as well.  What happened in this story is exactly what i would have expected.  The only question was how.

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What is it like to be a trained martial artist and have an untrained person on the street want to fight you?

 https://www.quora.com/

If they don't know you are a martial artist.

Martyn V. Halm, Former bouncer, trains in aikido and koryu bujutsu. Combat pragmatist.

Updated Dec 29 · Upvoted by Erica Friedman, 25 years of Martial Arts training, teaching and experience and I'm still a white belt.

"What is it like to be a trained martial artist and have an untrained person on the street want to fight you?"

Before I was a 'trained martial artist', I was a 'trained/experienced' street brawler and nightclub bouncer. Bouncers get challenged all the time, mostly by dickheads who want to prove their manhood.

I was on my break, standing outside drinking from a bottle, when an asshole (who I had confronted over cocaine use earlier) exited the club and noticed me. He and two of his friends walked up to me, so I lowered my bottle to my side. They stood in front of me in a semi-circle and the leader said, "I guess you don't feel so tough now."

"Unlike you," I said, "I don't need other people to prop up my ego."

That riled him into action. As he jabbed his finger at my chest, I buried the neck of the bottle in the armpit of his outstretched arm*. He turned green, dropped to his knees and started vomiting, and his friends stepped away as I walked around them and went back into the club.

Brutal action, I know, but I don't really care about being gentle with loudmouth idiots who try to intimidate me to show off to their friends about their alpha male status.

Addendum: This proved to be one of my more popular answers, but it also generated some questions that can be found in the comments. I'm just answering some of the more salient points here:

Why did the guy puke? Was the bottle to the armpit really that painful?

The armpit has a cluster of nerve endings and some main arteries going through it. If you want to experiment, jab a finger into your own armpit.

I'll wait.

Did you do it? Hurts, right?

Now, imagine the neck of a beer bottle being rammed violently into that tender spot. The pain and shock is unbelievable, and can induce paralysis of the arm and vomiting from the pain.

Is the paralysis permanent or temporary?

Depends on the force of penetration and the object shoved into the armpit. If you ram stiff fingers in an armpit that's covered by a leather coat, the numbness in the arm may take 15-30 minutes to abate.

With regards to my situation, he was wearing a suit jacket and T-shirt (Miami Vice Sonny Crocket Wannabe) and I used a glass bottleneck, which accounts for the pain being so immense that it induced intense nausea and vomiting. His arm wouldn't regain full function for a few days and his armpit would most likely have been sore for a week or more.

I didn’t know all that when I did this to him. I only found out later that this is a dangerous technique — especially if you ram the bottle in the left armpit, like I did — because the shock and pain can reach the heart and cause arrhythmia, from which a person could die (depending on age and general health, of course). If you'd do it on someone wearing only a T-shirt, a stiff thumb would have an immediate effect without running the risk of accidentally killing someone.

*The exact spot where I hit him is the subscapularis (the red part):

The subscapularis muscle is part of the rotator cuff. Bruising/damaging this muscle will make it difficult (if not impossible) to raise the elbow at the same height as the shoulder.

This part of the axilla (latin for armpit), also contains a major artery (just under your scapula or shoulder blade) and a whole slew of lymph nodes. In short, this is a major cluster of lymph nodes, major blood vessels, and nerves, overlaid by a rotator cuff muscle that will disable your arm when it's hurt.

Some people seem to doubt that a simple blow to the armpit could be vomit and paralysis inducing and might even kill someone. The fact that in duelling times people used daggers and rapiers to stab the armpit and kill someone was mostly due to the fact that people wore armour protecting other vul