Motor Skills in Self-Defense

Motor skills in real life self-defense. Professional MMA fighters and other long trained practitioners of different martial arts are highly skilled at what they do. They are specialists in their fields. But the rest of us are not so. There are three levels of motor skills that we begin to learn in childhood and develop and build upon. The first skill set to develop is gross motor skills. These include the development over time of the ability to use large muscle groups that coordinate body movements such as walking, running, jumping, throwing, clawing, striking, kicking, and maintaining balance.
The next set to develop over time as we grow and learn are fine motor skills, the ability to use precise coordinated movements such as writing, buttoning, cutting, tracing,  visual tracking, or threading a needle.
The last set to develop are complex motor skills, the ability to perform almost any act that involves three independent body parts working in unison.
If you're not a martial arts student who has been practicing for, say, 15 years, you will not be able to use fine or complex motor skills in a fight to defend yourself, and even if you are a 15 year student there is no guarantee that you'll be able to call upon fine or complex motor skills in the urgency of the moment, especially if you're ambushed or sucker punched or faced with more than one opponent who may be yielding weapons of one sort or another. 
The best motor skills the average person can practice to adapt to self-defense situations are gross motor skills. Skills such as kicking in the same way you would a football, poking with the fingers, such as a quick poke to the eyes, delivering elbow strikes, claw rakes with the fingers, grasping body parts and jerking on them, particularly the ears or hair, blocking movements, biting attacks, stomping on downed opponents. If you can get away from a situation before it becomes physical simply use the gross motor skill of running, run to the nearest well populated area, and if necessary, once there call the police. But if you cannot run, and cannot defuse the situation, fight using these gross motor attacks continually, not giving your opponent the chance to mount a defense, Continue to do so until he is incapacitated or runs himself from your onslaught.