When training a beginner to break a board, a teacher focuses on helping his students to conquer their instinctive aversion to self-inflicted harm. Whacking a board as hard as we can with our bare hands just doesn't come naturally. And our fear of hurting ourselves in doing so is entirely justified.
To break a board without breaking your hand, you have to do it just right, focusing your energy and hitting with enough force and follow-through more on this later. Luckily, it turns out that even the tiny bones in your hand can handle a lot of stress — 40 times more than concrete, believe it or not [source: Newton's Apple ]. Once students have mastered this initial phase, they can move on to the intermediate level in which they begin to increase the quantity of stuff they can break.
The more they're expected to break, the more force and focus they require to accomplish their goal. Teachers must be vigilant during this phase as overconfident students can really injure their hands.
From there it's a matter of students continuing to train their energy and focus until they can break a giant stack of concrete blocks with a single blow. That's not a joke. People actually do that. In fact, board-breaking has taken on a life of its own, and there are now international competitions where adepts demonstrate astounding feats of concentration and power [source: Serrano ]. Picture this: A man stands on a platform above a stack of seven massive slabs of ice, each one weighing nearly pounds kilograms.
Putting his hands behind his head, he suddenly bends his upper body down to the top slab and touches it with his forehead. He repeats this process several times until, on the last bend, he follows through and hammers his skull into the slab.
Incredibly, all seven blocks of ice break in half and fall to the ground. This really happened. Strongman J. Anderson, aka the Iceman, smashed 2, pounds kilograms of ice to pieces with his head on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
Breaking boards with your bare hand is a simpler feat than the one described above, and less potentially injurious although your hand is a precious thing, too, and should be treated accordingly — more on that later.
Typically, beginners start with a single board, roughly 1 foot 30 centimeters wide. The material is usually pine, which is a softwood that breaks much more easily than a resilient hardwood like oak.
The board should also be free of knots. There are a wide range of techniques students can use, such as "hammer fist" bringing your clenched fist down , "palm heel" striking with the heel of your palm and "knife hand" the good old karate chop.
Someone can hold the board, or it can be placed on supports. It should be held or supported on the sides, rather than the ends, allowing the practitioner to break the wood along its grain. Going against the grain, as the expression suggests, is much more difficult. Regardless of what technique a practitioner uses to break a board, instructors usually emphasize preparedness through practice.
Hitting a padded surface repeatedly helps increase accuracy, speed and strength while also toughening up the striking area of the hand or foot. Mental preparation is as important as physical in this case. Hitting anything accurately requires focus. Practitioners work on their focus through breathing techniques, such as breathing out sharply or even shouting as they strike. And when breaking a board, it's important to hit it as close to the center as possible. One of the key mental limitations that must be overcome is the body's natural instinct to slow down when approaching hard surfaces in order to avoid injury.
Paradoxically, if your hand or foot slows down before hitting the board, the wood won't break, and if it doesn't break, the force of your blow will rebound into your hand and injure it.
For this reason, instructors get their students to focus on hitting, not the board's surface, but a point a few inches beyond it. Imagining this point helps prevent the instinctive slow-down and ensures follow-through, which in turn helps transfer the full force of the blow to the board, breaking the wood instead of your hand or foot [source: American Martial Arts Academy ].
That's all very well, but technique doesn't really explain how it's actually possible to smash apart hard objects with your soft, pliable extremities. Breaking a board is pretty exciting and gives you a nice rush. I felt like I had the strength of a thousand bears and that my arms and hands we're actually deadly weapons! Sarah is feeling the rush too. If for some reason you're having trouble breaking the board, it's likely that you're just not committing enough to hitting it. Committal is the key I think.
In order to increase your level of commitment, try making a "kill face" as you're striking the board to increase your focus and summon more force. If you still need even more encouragement, try releasing a small scream, yell, or inspirational word of your choice as you deliver the blow. As I said before, you'll be amazed at how easy it is to break a wooden board. Everyone who tried to break a board in the Instructables office was able to do it, regardless of size, gender, and arm strength.
It's so easy, that even babies can do it! Once you've mastered simple board breaking with your hand, it could be time to try some other methods. There are ways to break boards with kicks, hand chops, elbows, knees, heads, and just about any body part you can imagine. Since I'm no expert though, I'll leave the explanation of these more difficult methods to a professional. The reverse elbow blow pictured in the third photo below seemed to be the next best and easiest way to break one board.
After consulting with my karate expert friend, I learned that the reverse elbow blow is actually more powerful then the heel of the hand blow, but it's just not quite as much fun or attractive, so I'm still sticking with the hand. Luckily, if you've bought plenty of pine boards, you have enough wood lying around that you can try them all.
One way to increase the level of difficulty when breaking boards is to break more than just a single board. So far, Eric N was the only person to successfully break more then just one board at Instructables HQ. I have tried breaking two boards with my hand several times, but so far I haven't been able to get both boards to break. Be warned, breaking two boards really does hurt - evidence of the pain can be seen in the video below and in the "try not to hurt yourself" video in the next step.
As I wrote into the warning in the intro step, if you break boards with zero experience, it's likely that you'll eventually hurt yourself. I sure did. To minimize injuries, practice just breaking one board at a time before moving on to two, and make sure that you're breaking boards that are large enough to protect your fingers. The smaller the board, the more likely it will be that your fingers will accidentally get whacked when your partner delivers their blow.
Furthermore, if you're going to start breaking multiple boards, or delivering other types of blows, consult more than just this overly simplified Instructable. I wrote this up because I wanted to share how invigorating and exciting breaking boards can be. It's by no means meant to be a complete guide that will enable you to become a karate master.
For that, I think you've actually got to take the class. The direction of the grain does matter, you want the wood to break around the hand or foot. A board will always break along the grain lines. Holders should never be holding the end grain of the wood, always the sides of the boards. If you are hitting with a palm strike, the grain should be vertical.
For a chop, the grain goes the same direction as the hand. Yes, one board is easy, but you can still get hurt. I wouldn't do more than one without proper instruction. You can see the blood begin to gush out of the wound. The answer is highly unlikely to impossible. Only in a movie that allows dramatic exaggeration is that possible, because it requires an extremely large force to break a large block of ice with a single hand strike.
However, from a physics point of view, breaking a thin pine board e. In order for the hand to be moving still at a high speed when the hand hits the board, the person must imagine that the board is further down from its actual position, i. Otherwise the hand would have a tendency to slow down when it reaches the actual position of the board. There is a couple of other ingredients which I will not bother to mention. Of course, the amount of force or energy that is required to break a board depends on the type of board.
Martial artists usually use one inch thick pine boards the length of the board is around 12 inches, and the width of the board is around 6 to 10 inches. Such pine boards usually take about 5 Joules of energy to break if the grain of the board runs parallel to the length of the hand strike, then it requires even less energy to break the board. To have an idea of how much energy is one Joule, let me give two common examples. Before we provide a quantitative explanation, we will first provide a qualitative explanation.
Now we present the quantitative explanation. The true and traditional karate boards are made of wood. There are a couple of different types of wood used around the world, but the industry-standard, as well as the traditional one, is pine wood. Pine is the perfect wood for breaking since it is crisp and sturdy, but soft enough to not cause injury and to allow even a beginner to break a thinner board. Pine is softwood, which makes it faster in terms of growth speed and also better for use in karate for breaking.
The second most popular arguably, since there is not much data on karate wood popularity; pine is the unanimous winner wood used for karate board-breaking is paulownia food. It is a soft and supple alternative to the pine boards if you live in regions where it might be more readily available than pine.
The size of the boards varies by the skill level of the board-breaker. The way testing is also made harder is by increasing the thickness of the board. Some really extreme versions can go all the way up to 3 inches, though the use of that is very rare, especially with wooden boards, mostly for safety reasons. Should a grown man try to punch through a 3-inch thick piece of wood, they will most likely regret it, unless they spent a lot of time years conditioning their hands.
When watching a video of karate masters breaking boards, sometimes many of them simultaneously, one might wonder how hard it really is to perform this feat of strength and technique, since the masters really make it look very easy. There are some karate schools in which children are asked to try to punch through a wooden plank on their 3rd training, as proof that the instructors provide quality teaching to the children. Increasing the difficulty of the technique that is to be performed is a major way to make the plank-breaking a lot more difficult.
If instead of a knife-hand strike, one shall perform a straight punch, it already makes alignment and precision a lot more difficult, since the range of motion is much more difficult to keep steady in a straight direction away from the body than in just a straight line downwards. From here on, you can already imagine the countless techniques which become harder and harder to perform with the strength needed to break a wooden plank. One of the most absolutely mindblowing techniques performed while breaking wood is actually part of taekwondo and consists of several types of extremely high spinning jump-kicks.
Okay, so we have covered the basics and the reasons behind board-breaking, and also the materials the boards are made from, what is left is only the technique itself. Even though the fundamentals are easy to learn, there are some elemental rules one has to follow in order to be successful at breaking boards without injuring themselves.
The first and maybe most important part has to do with the positioning of the plank itself.
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