Uh, I know it is against the first three rules, but what about fight club?

To compensate for our communities obvious lack of interest in preparing us for such physical confrontations, in high school some of us used to spar with each other, sometimes bare knuckle, sometimes with various blunt weapons. We'd get beat up on occasion. I got my nose broke, and a couple guys got knocked out, but we had rules, and we were pretty mature about it all things considered. Some of the guys were martial arts trained, but no one was what you'd call highly degreed.

We learned some interesting things about fighting. One was that, regardless of how opponents are armed, at a certain level of proficiency he who strikes first almost always wins. Another observation was that hands, arms, and feet are poor defensive tools against just about any weapon. Another was that when you are fighting for survival, attacks must be fully committed; there is no such thing as a limited fight. Your best chance is to gain the upper hand and you fight until the opponent is unquestionably incapable of continuing the fight. When in doubt, keep fighting.

I am sure this sounds boastful to some. The facts are that the sparring probably saved me a lot of trouble in more than a couple confrontations later on (I can think of two events in the Navy while on liberty abroad), possibly conditioning me to a certain latent guarded level in public. Not that I'm anything special, but as with OBG's notion, a little training early on makes for a good dose of reality about how some things in life can go.