The mental feedback mentioned above has a very conscious component as well, one which martial arts training can help you overcome, even wth an adrenaline surge.
A crude example: every year Many children die because they are ‘locked’ behind a wall (for example: they lock themselves in a bathroom, and as daddy and mommy panic on the other side of the wall, proceed to sample the tantalizing chemicals in the cabinets or under the sink.) Similarly, I’ve seen many a strong man injure their shoulder by bashing it against a wall. BUT…
Try taking a 3 lb brick (1350g) , and dropping it 4-5ft (130-150cm) from one hand to the other. It’s an easy catch. Now drop that same brick from the same height onto a 16" wide strip of normal gypsum wallboard (you can choose the length, 16" is the standard space betweent studs in US house framing) You might break the wallboard or merely damage it, but you’ll get a sense for how fragile the walls in our houses are. If you’d used a 11lb (5kg) cinderblock, the wall would likely be a goner, yet the force would be so modest that even a child can catch a cinderblock dropped 4-5ft.
This isn’t a definitive scientific demonstration, just an eye-opening exercise. The “walls” that restrain us in our daily lifes are more mental than physical. any 98lb weakling can walk straight through standard gypsum walls at will, with a little thought and inspection.
Similarly, any serious weight lifter has had the experience of being ‘unable’ to lift a given weight, due to improper mindset, and then easily lifting it --and more-- after reframing their thinking for a few minutes. It’s not the muscles that stop them, it’s the mind.
We have a complex set of reflexes in out brain and spinal cords which act to modulate the force we exert in daily life, for practical reasons, for precision, and also to protect our own muscles, ligaments, etc. from injury. After a few decades of operating under these ‘rules’ they can be very hard to overcome. However in an emergency, we may unthinkingly exert genuinely maximal contraction, and generate forces we never knew we had.
Never arm wrestle a wild chimp, though you have the same or more muscle mass and 99.9%+ similar muscle physiology. They will crush you, not because of a slightly more advantageous joint geometry, but because they have greater experience with maximal exertion.