People You Don't Want To Mess With

Here are some people you really don't want to mess with!

October 13, 2022・

20 min read

From the self-proclaimed “scariest man on the planet”, to a sword-master that can chop a speeding bullet in two, let’s take a look at some people you really don’t want to mess with.

Savage Sajad

First in our line-up is Sajad Gharibi, or “The Iranian Hulk” as he’s otherwise known. And it’s not hard to see why he’s got that nickname. A weightlifter and aspiring bodybuilder, Sajad stands over 6 feet tall and weighs in approximately at a whopping 390lb!

This weight translates into some pretty powerful strength too, and Sajad doesn’t shy away from showing it off. If he can crush a frying pan with bare hands, I don’t want to imagine what he could do to my head.

How does he go about training? Just the usual stuff, such as weightlifting, getting walloped with a great big piece of wood and punching holes through walls. But the bulking behemoth isn’t all bark and no bite.

In April 2022, Sajad put his unconventional training to the test and went head-to-head in the boxing ring against Martyn Ford, AKA “The Scariest Man on the Planet”. However, it didn't go very well:

Unyielding Uguru

If there’s one man whose routine was relatively unaffected by the COVID pandemic, it’s the almighty Giga Uguru. That’s because for 20 years Giga has honed his impressive martial arts skills entirely at home, without the help of a trainer.

Hailing from London, UK, his parents encouraged him from the incredibly young age of just 4 to take up taekwondo. Then, at 10, he picked up Thai boxing as well as a whole host of other combat sports and gymnastics. And all the hard work has paid off; the sheer agility of this guy is astounding!

His unique blend of acrobatics and multiple fighting styles make him seem like a pretty formidable opponent. However, for all his flashy moves, Giga isn’t actually a fighter. Therefore, if he pitted himself against someone with a bit more experience he might not prove as dangerous as he looks. That being said, there’s no way I’d be starting any beef with this guy.

Solid Savickas

Winner of Lithuania’s Strongest Man not once, not twice, but a staggering fifteen times, this beast – who weighed in at more than 400 lbs at his peak - can squat almost 2 and a half times his body weight.

And he wasn’t content to just be Lithuania’s strongest man. Savickas has also won the world title four times!

The fearless force of nature first got into weightlifting when he was a teenager, after watching a strongman competition on TV. Then, at the age of just 16, he entered a competition himself. Since then, Savickas has broken over twenty world records and secured his place in history as one of the strongest people the world has ever seen.

Back in 2013, the insatiable Savickas pulled 12 Nissan Note cars, weighing an astonishing 28,500lb, a distance of over 16 feet. That’s like dragging two fully grown African elephants along the road behind you.

Does that mean Savickas could take on two elephants in a fight? Maybe not, but the elephants aren’t going anywhere near him to find out, they’re too scared!

The Incredible Imai

When I was 11, I spent most of my free time playing in the backyard or watching TV. For now-11-year-old Bruce Lee fanatic Ryusei Imai however, that’s all a bit so-so. This absolutely jacked Japanese junior first watched his idol’s films at the age of just 1. And he’s been hooked ever since!

Now, Ryusei trains for three-and-a-half hours every day to achieve his goal of becoming just like the man himself. His father insists he doesn’t pressure Ryusei; the 11-year-old just loves it!

But it’s not just his training regime that sets him apart from the other kids. He’s also talented at using nunchakus. Check out this perfect rendition of Bruce Lee’s famous scene in the film Enter The Dragon – impressive for any age, but Ryusei is only five here!

The only nunchakus I’d held at that age were the Nintendo Wii controllers. And considering Ryusei’s hits are hard enough to make a grown man wince, I think it’s safe to say nobody’s stealing this kid’s eraser in class.

Rowdy Ronda Rousey

If you’re looking to show people that they really shouldn’t mess with you, I’d recommend learning a load of different combat sports, becoming a professional wrestler, then starting a career as a formidable UFC fighter. Sound like a lot of work? Well, that’s because it is.

But American badass Ronda Rousey has done all this, and in 2018 her efforts got the ultimate recognition when she became the first female fighter to be inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame. But way back before she’d even started her grand career, Rousey was already a bigtime badass.

One day, while she was trying to enjoy a movie at the theatre, young Ronda felt an annoying nudging on the back of her head. A group of troublemakers had sat behind her, and one girl was kicking her feet up against Ronda’s seat.

Ronda asked again and again for the girl to stop, but the invasive foot-assailant only laughed and ignored her. She was about to learn the hard way that you don’t ignore Ronda Rousey.

Ronda waited until the movie finished, then snatched the annoying girl’s shoe and launched it across the theater hall. Immediately, two guys in the group stood up and demanded Ronda go fetch it. She refused. Within seconds, chaos broke out.

Both guys shoved Ronda hard and one of them started swinging in for a punch; but Ronda was ready. She dodged the blow, hit one of the attackers, then threw the other straight to the ground.

Everybody else in the theater apparently stood up and applauded the impressive show of self-defense, and the rowdy group of friends made off sharpish. Since then, Ronda’s earned an Olympic medal in judo, multiple best fighter awards, and won both a WWE and UFC championship. You don’t fight Ronda; you run.

Grizzly Greek

There are a lot of people I wouldn’t mess with. Bodybuilders, championship fighters, my mom, but Kyriakos Grizzly is none of these. This huge Greek powerhouse isn’t a conventional tough guy, and his unique style of weightlifting has drawn a lot of criticism from more by-the-books bodybuilders.

However, Kyriakos, at his heaviest, weighed in at almost half a ton of pure power. This means the colossal giant can lift insanely heavy weights (up to 1100lb) using an odd technique known as “shrugging”. And when Kyriakos shrugs, he ain’t quiet about it:

However, I don’t recommend copying him, as shrugging isn’t a particularly safe way of lifting weights. But if that guy came at me screaming like Donald Duck on steroids there’s no way I’d be hanging around to critique his form.

The Amazing Machii

When I was a kid, I thought sword fighting was super cool. But understandably, I wasn’t ever allowed an actual sword. For Japanese katana master Isao Machii though, this was no such problem.

First picking up a blade at the age of just five, Isao trained hard and now holds a remarkable six Guinness World Records for his crazy katana skills. The Japanese Iaido master and modern-day samurai first became famous in 2004 after he achieved the incredible feat of slicing through an upright tatami mat like this seven times before it fell over.

What’s more, he went on to beat his own record and slice one eight times in 2015; a record that still stands today! But even that isn’t Isao’s most astounding accomplishment.

Back in 2013, he decided to test his skills at a whole new level by having someone shoot a speeding bullet at him and seeing if he could slice it in two.

Surprisingly, this isn’t the plot to an over-the-top anime, it actually happened.

It was a BB pellet, not a real bullet. But that just meant the target was even smaller! The man firing the gun aimed at Isao. Isao stood firm, with his hand clenched tightly on his katana. The tension in the air was palpable.

Then, he pulled the trigger. The pellet rocketed towards Isao at a whopping 98mph and he went for it. Unbelievably, the lightning-fast swordsman struck his target dead on. They say the pen is mightier than the sword, but they obviously haven’t met Isao Machii.

Krazy Karelin

Fighting with a sword might look cool, but if you were to ask Russian wrestler Aleksandr Karelin, he’d say you don’t need any weapons. Because he is the weapon. Between 1987 and 2000, Karelin represented the Soviet Union and later Russia in the upper body oriented Greco-Roman style of wrestling.

As well as earning 3 gold medals at the Olympics, he won a mind-blowing 887 matches across his career, only losing on two occasions, and by just one point both times. Unsurprisingly, Karelin is widely considered to be the greatest Greco-Roman wrestler of all time.

His most famous move, the Karelin lift, struck fear into the hearts of everybody that he came up against. With apparent ease he’d pick up immensely heavy wrestlers from the floor, flip them over, and slam them hard into the ground; something that was previously thought impossible for the heavier divisions.

Karelin was always a heavy hitter though. Even when he first started training at 13, he towered an imposing 5 foot 10 inches over his peers! Of all his opponents however, you might be surprised at who – or rather, what – Karelin says was his toughest.

Not a human at all, but a refrigerator. It turns out that while training in an apartment block, he bear-hugged a fridge and carried it up eight flights of stairs. The biggest battle I’ve had also involves a fridge, only mine was battling whether or not I should eat its entire contents!

Going Goggins

There’s an old saying, “when the going gets tough, the tough get going”. Well, in that case American super-athlete and ex-Navy SEAL David Goggins has been going his whole life – which is why he’s known as the world’s toughest man.

After escaping an abusive father at a young age, Goggins embarked on a punishing 20-year military career and became the only member of the US Armed Forces to complete SEAL training, the US Army Ranger School, and Air Force Tactical Controller training.

But even after leaving the military, Goggins refused to slow down. Through training his body day in, day out, in 2013 he broke the world record for most pull ups completed in 24 hours. He managed a grueling 4,030 in just over half the allotted time!

As if that wasn’t impressive enough, he’s also completed over 60 ultra-marathons. That means runs that are even longer than the already exhausting 26-mile standard marathons. In those alone, he’s traveled at least a whopping 1,600 miles!

The real-life action man says physical and mental suffering are a journey of self-discovery for him and make him feel alive like nothing else. David Goggins has proven you can do just about anything if you put your mind to it. Anything other than messing with him, of course.

Fearsome Ford

We’ve met the toughest man in the world, but what about the scariest? Known by his moniker “The Nightmare”, British bodybuilder and MMA fighter Martyn Ford is a pretty huge contender for the title.

Standing at an almighty 6 foot 8 inches and weighing over 300lb, Ford’s intimidating physique is made even scarier by his habit of screaming at any photographer he sees.

Not that he was always this terrifying. Ford was once a skinny cricketer, but after suffering an injury and losing his love of the game, he decided to channel his efforts into something else – namely, becoming an absolute tank.

As well as his intense training regime, Ford eats between 4,500 and 8,000 calories a day to sustain his extraordinary level of muscle. That’s over three times the recommended amount for us ordinary humans!

How does he do it? Simple! By eating 8 meals every day, consisting of 30 ½ ounces of chicken, with veg, fish and a butt-ton of egg whites on the side. And by butt-ton I mean that for his final meal he smashes down a staggering 15 of them!

All this means he’s more than equipped to give our old friend the Iranian Hulk a run for his money when they go head-to-head. Ford’s certainly got confidence and has claimed he could beat both a bear and a shark if they were fighting him at the same time!

I’m not sure how the logistics of that would work, but I’d sure love to see it – at a very, very safe distance that is.

The Plight Of Prosperi

How would you fare if you were stranded in the middle of the Sahara Desert with no phone, food, or water? I’ll bet not great. But back in 1994, Italian ex-police officer and pentathlete Mauro Prosperi horrifyingly found himself in this exact situation.

He was running the Morocco-based ‘Marathon of the Sands’, a 155-mile ultramarathon race through the Sahara, when a sandstorm erupted after four days. Determined not to slow down, Prosperi kept going, even though he could see next to nothing. But when the storm subsided, he realized he’d veered 186 miles off course.

Utterly lost, he was forced to use any means necessary to survive. He caught lizards and other small animals to eat, and when night came, he buried himself in the sand to keep warm.

The next day, things got even worse. After finding an old Islamic shrine to take shelter in, Prosperi saw a colony of bats hanging from the ceiling. He ate them and drank their blood for nourishment, but it wasn’t enough. Eventually, through sheer desperation, he turned to drinking his own pee.

This miserable cycle went on for days, but Prosperi never gave up. Finally, on the ninth day, he noticed human footprints in the sand. Elated, the exhausted Italian stumbled after them, straight to a nomad camp. He was saved! Its occupants called the police and Prosperi was taken to hospital. He was so dehydrated that a whopping 16 liters of fluids were pumped back into him. That’s eight big bottles of soda’s worth!

You might think that following such a traumatic experience, Prosperi would never run again. However, since that fateful race, the determined runner has gone on to compete another six times, and even placed 13th in 2001, which in a race with over 1,000 competitors is very impressive.

If this guy is willing to eat bats, drink his own pee, and power through nine days of hell just to risk going through it all again, what lengths do you think he’d go to just to beat you in a fight?

Virile Vito

Imagine you’re walking down a dark street and you come across a guy with massive muscles and a confident smile blocking your path. It'll definitely put you on edge. Such a man is Vito Pirbazari, and he’s a German bodybuilder who wasn’t always so happy.

When he was young, Vito was involved in a major car crash that left him with part of his spine bent excruciating 57 degrees in the wrong direction. For eight long years he battled depression, relying on painkillers and physiotherapy to keep him going.

But then he found bodybuilding and channeled his emotions into something positive. An insane amount of hard work and determination later, and Vito has come out the other side happier and bulkier than ever. He still lives with his injury, but those mega muscles have relieved the pain so much that he can live an almost normal life.

Now he spends his time pumping iron, staring dramatically into the middle distance, and facing off against police officers (a picture of him squaring up to a policeman during a scene in the TV show ‘Dogs Of Berlin’ went viral recently).

But Vito doesn’t just battle it out on screen. The near 300lb bodybuilder pitted himself against a wrestler less than half his size back in early 2021. Surely that was an easy win for Vito, right?

Well, the two squared off, Vito getting aggressive right off the bat and scoring the first point, but it wasn’t long before his much smaller rival fought back and kept fighting back. Crazily, the skinny guy won!

Which just goes to show brawn isn’t everything, technique is king. However, in a man on man fight without any rules I don’t fancy that wrestler’s chances.

The Iron Grandpa

When I get to the ripe age of 70, I intend to spend my days in some warm country, sipping on cocktails and telling youths about all the amazing knowledge I’ve acquired. For Chinese bodybuilder Yang Xinmin though, AKA “The Iron Grandpa”, this would be a very boring way to live. That’s because Xinmin is over 70 years old and still trains his body every single day!

He’s been keeping up his vigorous exercise routine for a solid 40 years. That’s so long that he actually participated in China’s first ever bodybuilding competition, in 1983. And since then, he’s won over 100 trophies and medals.

For a senior citizen, Xinmin looks incredible, and it’s undoubtedly down to his super-active lifestyle and strict diet of protein and fiber. In fact, his doctor says Xinmin’s got the bone density of a 30-year-old!

As we get older, our bones naturally become more brittle and easier to break, but weightlifting and a diet have been proven to offset this. So, just because Xinmin’s on the older side doesn’t mean you should underestimate him, he's the Iron Grandpa after all.

Mad Mas

How would you fancy your chances against a man who could chop the horns off a raging bull with nothing but his bare hands? I’d put them as pretty slim. It’s a good job for you then that Mas Oyama, founder of the intense Kyokushin style of karate, isn’t around anymore.

This remarkable karate master started studying martial arts in 1932 at just 9 years old, and by 21 he’d already earned his 4th Dan black belt, making him a karate master. Two years later, at age 23, Oyama decided to dedicate himself fully to the sport.

Taking the advice of his sensei, he scaled the legendary Mount Minobu in the Yamanashi Prefecture of Japan to begin the next stage of his training in complete isolation. Although he stuck it out for a grueling 14 months however, the friend that had been bringing him food ran into issues and couldn’t continue.

Oyama was forced to come down before his training was complete. But that didn’t stop him. Soon after, he determinedly went up a different mountain, and continued his intense training 12 hours a day for 18 whole months!

He’d meditate beneath freezing waterfalls, lift heavy rocks, leap over boulders, and repeatedly hit trees and stones. All to condition his body and mind into the perfect fighting machine.

After a total of 32 punishing months, Oyama finally came back down the mountain, ready to become one of the greatest karate masters to have ever lived. In the years that followed he not only created a whole new style of karate, but also fought a total of 42 bulls to demonstrate his insane skills.

Supposedly, Oyama even put some of the huge animals down with just one smack to the face! While this is highly unethical, you’ve gotta hand it to him, it’s scarily impressive. In fact, you’d have had a better chance against a bull than Mas Oyama.

Incredible Kuznetsova

If there’s one person that went from nought straight to ten on the “don’t-mess-with-me-scale”, it’s gotta be Nataliya Kuznetsova. Born in 1991, this Russian bodybuilder described herself as a “timid mouse” when she was a young teenager.

However, after taking up weightlifting at the age of 14, her confidence grew massively, and that wasn’t the only thing! Now, Kuznetsova weighs an astonishing 220lb, making her the heaviest known female bodybuilder in the world.

And she’s very open about how using anabolic steroids and estrogen blockers has helped her get there. Both are drugs that work together to ensure she builds muscle mass faster; at the price of a whole host of potential side effects, including a more masculine physique.

But Nataliya isn’t complaining. She can deadlift the weight of almost three men, and with biceps that are thicker than the height of bowling pins, I’m sure she’d have no problem snapping you clean in half. You shouldn't mess with her, unless you’re bored of being in one piece, that is.

Dangerous Dharejo

Everyone deserves equal rights to education. But back in 1990s Pakistan, unlike boys, girls would only be schooled to the second grade. Nazo Dharejo, however, was one girl that didn’t accept this.

She was insistent on learning everything she could and, in the absence of a school education, she got her sister-in-law to teach her to read instead. Her father also disagreed with inequality in his country and, against tradition, trained Nazo and his other two daughters to fight. And it’s a good job he did.

Years later, when Nazo was a young woman, her grandfather died, and his property and land were inherited by his family. Nazo’s father, believing the property was rightfully his, moved in. He brought Nazo, her mother, and her sisters with him.

But other relatives of the family didn’t like this at all, insisting the house belonged to them instead. So, the jealous relatives framed Nazo’s father for murder! He was arrested, and later died.

With no man left in the house, the rival claimants prepared to take the property and its land by force. Just to be sure though, they recruited the support of multiple local bandits to help them.

By nightfall, a formidable 200-strong force of armed men had gathered around the property. Nazo and her family saw them coming but were hopelessly outnumbered; or so you might think. The horde of men opened fire, raining a storm of bullets onto the house.

But Nazo didn’t whimper in fear like they’d hoped. She picked up an assault rifle and fired back. Her mother and sisters followed her lead and did the same. The battle was ferocious and raged all night long.

But after hours of desperate fighting, unbelievably, the girls were winning. And just as ammo was running scarce, Nazo realized the gunfire had stopped. The remaining men were retreating! It was over.

Since that fateful evening, nobody has doubted Nazo’s abilities, and no further claims on her house were ever made. Against near-impossible odds, Nazo and her family triumphed. Therefore, if you want to mess with Nazo, you’d better bring more than an army.