Here is a good martial arts story for you.
Just thought of it for some reason.
About 20 years ago I was doing a series of self defense seminars in different sports karate dojos.
Basically showing students of sports karate, how they could make their training a bit more self defence like, by paying more attention to the original roots of karate which was not about scoring points in matches.
I'd have them work at different stuff and one thing I showed was how you can deflect punches by jerking the puncher around.
This, of course, doesn't work very well if the person punching you is way bigger than you, so I would always pick a smaller person to punch at me.
So once I had a hold of this small feisty girl's Gi and told her to try to punch me in the face.
She is gamely punching away and I'm jerking her this way or that so she is only hitting air.
After a few seconds I figured I'd got the message through, so I let go of her.
Then she hammered me right in the kisser, hard enough to split my lip and sit me on my ass.
So I learned that saying "stop" before you let go is a smart thing