Karate Board Breaking Stand? The 127 Detailed Answer

Last week I talked about why some schools break a lot of boards, why some schools don’t break any boards at all, and why we fall somewhere in between. This week I want to talk a little bit about the breaking itself. There are many myths about breaking. Many of them are immortalized by martial artists – sometimes in a shameful way, but mostly out of ignorance.

While you can theoretically use whatever you want for a fracture demonstration (it doesn’t even have to be wood!), most schools use small variations on the same basic concept. Schools that are seriously breaking most often use a variation of a 12″ by 12″ white pine board about 1″ thick. That’s an approximation, as most martial artists just go to the hardware store and look for standard lumber (I do). Standard wood does not come in perfect 1 inch increments as it will shrink after cutting.

I usually buy a long 12×1 board in the length that is most economical on the day I’m in business. Then I’ll get them to cut it into 12 inch sections. However, a 12×1 board is usually actually 11.75 inches by 0.75 inches, or very close. Cutting it into 12 inch lengths usually means the last piece will be closer to 11 inches.

I buy white pine. As I mentioned last week, some schools are using even softer woods like balsa (thankfully this isn’t very common these days as it’s too easy to be embarrassed about during a demo). Don’t buy hardwood like oak, cherry, or ash. It will break your hands. Just as important, don’t buy pressure-treated lumber (more on that in a moment).

A standard 12 x 12 white pine board takes about 1100 Newtons (about 250 lbs) of force to break. Since wood is a natural material, this varies slightly from board to board. A rule of thumb that martial artists are generally taught is that breaking a board is equivalent to breaking a rib. Unfortunately, this is one of those false myths that most martial artists are taught by their instructors and never questioned. Safety studies conducted by the Society of Automotive Engineers indicate that it takes approximately 400 pounds of force to break a rib. This varies a bit depending on the rib (the smaller ones at the bottom of the rib cage break more easily than the thicker ones at the top of the rib cage). 250 pounds might crack one, but one is unlikely to break.

250 kg is not so bad. The average adult male in the US weighs just under 200 pounds. It doesn’t take super great technique to add another 50 pounds of force — but it does take good technique to properly protect your hands, feet, or whatever else you might hit. That’s why I don’t have brand new students doing board breaks, whatever the marketing benefit. I do not allow students breaks until I am certain their form is sufficient to avoid injury.

For easy breaks, the board is placed or held between two supports. The first break I give most students is a downward hammer blow, so the board is usually placed on two cinder blocks. The blocks are arranged to keep the board stable but with the maximum distance between the two blocks. On breaks, using techniques such as a punch or kick, the board is usually held by one or two people, but in a similar manner. Arms are strongly positioned on either side of the board with the minimal hand coverage required for grip. In any case, this represents the “width” of the board.

The wider the board, the easier it will break. If you’ve ever snapped a stick over your knee in the woods, you’ve probably spotted it yourself. Anything wider than 12″ results in boards that are ridiculously easy to break. A width of less than 12″ can result in boards that are very difficult to break.

The last dimension is the height of the board. For adults, I use standard boards that are 12″ high. For kids we go smaller – 10″ or 8″. Some schools go as low as 6″ or even 4″ boards. My personal opinion is that if the kid is young enough to need such a small board, it probably shouldn’t break anyway because their bones are still developing. I also take fewer breaks with the older children than with adults – and I don’t do as much with adults.

A final trick some schools use is to bake their boards or bricks before breaking them. Yes, bake in the oven like a cake. Baking the wood or brick removes moisture, making it much easier to break. This trick is performed much more often with brick than with wood. From a distance you can’t tell the brick has burned – unless you see a giant powder puff when it’s broken.

On the other hand, never break a board or brick that is wet! This strengthens the material and will most likely break your hand or foot – especially if it’s a brick! Get some dry brake material and make sure you keep it dry before your braking session! For the same reason, avoid pressure-treated wood and only get the untreated variety. The chemicals they treat it with retain a lot of liquid (not water but chemicals) in the wood, making it much harder to break. I once witnessed a belt test where the student was instructed to buy their own boards and they absolutely couldn’t break the board. The instructor later pointed out that it was pressure treated and that was the reason.

First of all, if you’re about to break something, have someone around who knows what they’re doing — and even then, be careful. It can be fun. It can be a great way to prove to yourself and others that you are capable of generating a lot of power in your punches. But if you’re not careful, it can be a short way to serious injury.

Breaking boards in karate provides not only a physical demonstration of strength, but also a mental demonstration of focus. For practical training purposes, breaking boards allows karate practitioners to practice hitting a solid object with maximum power and accuracy, which you might not be able to do with a training partner. To train in karate with boards, choose soft wood species that will give you the benefits of breaking boards without hurting your hands and feet.

pine wood

Pine wood is a good choice for breaking boards due to its softness. For a clean break, always break boards along the grain and avoid hitting large branches. Also, stay away from hard materials like oak and chipboard, which are difficult to break and can cause injury.

Prepare the boards

To dry out your pine boards and make them easier to split, bake them in the oven before breaking the boards. You can also buy your boards pre-cut and dried from a crushing board manufacturer. Start with one board if you are new to board breaking and work your way up to breaking multiple boards, placing spacers between each board layer.

In the late 1970s, a team of karate-loving physicists decided to conduct an experiment inspired by their collective passion for martial arts. The group consisted of physicist Michael Feld, a brown belt who enjoyed illustrating the physics of karate through live demonstrations in his classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Ronald McNair, future astronaut and fifth degree black belt; and student Stephen Wilk.

“The image of a karate expert breaking solid slabs of wood and concrete with his bare hands is a familiar one,” begins a 1979 article by Feld, McNair, and Wilk Tear off a block of wood or concrete without injury? what’s the trick

The perfect karate swing is nothing more than a precise application of Newton’s laws.

As it turns out, there’s no trick—the perfect karate swing is nothing more than a precise application of Newton’s laws.

Feld, McNair, and Wilk placed wood and concrete in a hydraulic press to determine the amount of stress (force) required to crack the underside of the objects. A plank of wood can bend about an inch before breaking, which requires a force of 500 Newtons. Concrete blocks only need to deflect a millimeter before they break, but because the material is less pliable than wood, this displacement requires 2,500 to 3,000 Newtons. And because some energy is lost on impact, the fist has to exert even more force to actually break the blocks.

Fortunately, the human hand is capable of generating a very high level of force in a very short amount of time. The effect of a typical punch lasts only about five milliseconds. Through a combination of theory and experiment, the team discovered that within that short period of time, “the hand of the karateka or karate practitioner … can exert a force in excess of 3,000 Newtons, a 675-pound punch.” The team’s model shows that the hand must reach a speed of 6.1 meters per second to break wood and 10.6 meters per second to break concrete. “Such speeds are consistent with our observation that novices can break wood but not concrete,” they write. “A hand speed of 6.1 meters per second is within reach for beginners, but a speed of 10.6 meters per second takes training and practice.”

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Feld and McNair were able to show off their martial arts skills during the investigation. Both were photographed hitting a stack of wooden planks at 120 frames per second. This allowed them to measure the displacement, velocity, and acceleration of different parts of the fist. These photos showed that the fist “squeezes and deforms so much that it hardly behaves like a solid object.”

The obvious follow-up question, “How come the karateka’s hand doesn’t get crushed by the force of the karate hit?” Here’s where anatomy comes in: human bone is five times stiffer than concrete and fifty times harder to break (a successful karate chop of a femur would require a force greater than 25,000 Newtons). The bones in the hand can easily absorb the stress from the impact. Of course, it’s the technique, not the power, that delivers the true power. A successful shot must hit the board right in the middle. With enough training, karate represents the human body at its maximum, writes the group, and “the precision required…makes karate not only an excellent physical discipline, but also a mental one.”

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Breaking is a martial arts technique used in competitions, demonstrations and tests. Shatter is an action in which a martial artist uses a striking face to shatter one or more objects using skills honed in their art form. The striking surface is usually a hand or foot, but can also be a fingertip, toe, head, elbow, ankle, or knee. The most common object is a piece of wood or brick, although breaking cinder blocks, glass, or even a piece of metal such as steel bars is also common. Glass is usually discouraged as its shards can cause injury if broken.

Breaking is often seen in karate, taekwondo, and pencak silat. Spetsnaz are also known for breaking boards and bricks, but not all styles of martial arts place the same emphasis on or use it. In styles where punching and kicking are less important and the emphasis is on grappling or weapons, breaking is less pronounced. Traditional Japanese martial arts schools place little if any emphasis on board breaking, although the art of breaking objects was known as tameshiwari (試し割り), while the similar practice of tameshigiri, or “test cutting” is used in the sword arts.

Types [ edit ]

Breaking in competition can be based on artistic impression, the number of items broken in a given time, the number of items broken in a single hit, or the time to break a series of items. There are several certified crushing categories in various world record journals such as the Guinness Book. In a demonstration, a martial artist demonstrates skill by performing an impromptu or choreographed sequence of pauses for an audience. Martial arts schools sometimes feature challenging breaks to promote and inspire enrollment or participation.

During the advancement test, many martial arts styles require students to demonstrate their skills by performing breaks. The difficulty of a required break depends on the rank the student is testing for. Failure to perform a required break is often sufficient reason for failing a promotion test.

A brick breaking demonstration

materials [edit]

Wooden planks are the most commonly used fragments in most martial arts. Individual boards used can range from nominal sizes as small as 6″ × 12″ × 1″ (152 × 305 × 25 mm) to as large as 12″ × 12″ × 1″ (305 × 305 × 25 mm; a board with a Nominal thickness of 1″ has an actual thickness of ¾” or 19 mm). The typical adult test panel is approximately 10″×12″×1″ (254×305×25 mm).[1]

The grain of the board must be cut parallel to the hitting hand.

Children can use narrower and thinner boards, with 4- and 5-year-olds sometimes breaking boards measuring 4″×12″×½″ (102×305×13 mm), and there are also plastic boards made of various composites, which varies the level of difficulty may vary upon breaking.

technique [edit]

In general, crushing is used both as a method of measuring punching power by martial artists, since there was no other way to do it, and only recently have devices such as accelerometers been used in martial arts, and as a measure of mental toughness. the ability of mind and body to transcend.

Generally, a martial artist engaged in breaking practices by repeatedly striking hard surfaces. Masutatsu Oyama, a famous crusher known for snapping the horns off bulls,[2] used trees. In karate, a device called a makiwara is used; This device is gaining popularity among practitioners of other martial arts today. In the past, Shaolin and other early martial artists used many different types of devices to condition themselves, not always simply to break, but using the same concepts used today. For example, Iron Palm, Iron Shin, Iron Shirt, Iron Head and other types of training focus on conditioning different parts of the body to withstand or give punches like those seen in martial arts breaking today. Many Chinese systems are also of the school of thought that breaking uses “internal energy” or chi that does not depend on muscle strength and body weight.

The general principles used in martial arts breaking training are similar to the same principles used for most track and field athletes. The body adapts to stress. There are generally three areas that a martial artist will want to force their body to conform to: the bones, the skin (calluses), and the muscles (for both mass and speed). The general principle here – for the bones for example – is found in Wolff’s Law, which states that the skeletal system is stronger after healing when injured. Craig Edmunds demonstrates this theory in a seminar on measuring bone density after the hand fracture and then measuring bone density after healing. In this way, the breaking practitioner works no differently than a bodybuilder who lifts weights and then rests to heal and allow the muscles to grow stronger.

This type of training is called “progressive resistance training”. Differences in body structure in the form of calcium deposits can often be seen between a breaking practitioner and a non-practitioner. Mike Reeves, a master crusher, advocates using a makiwara and ankle push-ups in his book. For ankle push-ups, he recommends starting with softer ground material and working your way up to concrete.[3]

USBA/WBA founder Drew Serrano, producer of the documentary film Breaking All Records,[4] encourages practitioners to gradually increase the difficulty and amount of material to avoid injury. He suggests that beginners should start with wooden boards and increase the amount as their technical ability increases. Once a certain level of well-being is achieved, both physically and mentally, harder materials such as concrete can be tried.[3][4]

There are safety concerns in martial arts breaking, so experts encourage learners to seek an instructor. There are many small foot and hand bones that need to be conditioned very carefully and slowly for safety reasons. Repeated damage to the knuckle extensor capsules can lead to long-term dexterity problems.[5]

Speed, Power, Smoothness, and Momentum[ edit ]

There are generally 3 classifications of brakes: speed breaks, power breaks, and soft breaks. In addition, there is a fourth, lesser-known classification known as impulse pauses.[3][4]

Speed ​​breaks are breaks where the impacting object is not held. The only way to break the object is to hit the surface with sufficient velocity at a focused point of impact. Sometimes a board to be broken is lightly held between two fingers by a person; An advanced dan test may involve attempting to break a plank as it falls through the air. Regardless of the strength of the racquet, the board will only break if hit with sufficient speed.

Power breaks are breaks where the striking object is assisted. Either the fracture uses human holders for horizontal, angular, or vertical upstrokes, or the fracture requires the objects to be stacked for vertical downstrokes. For a stacked break, the object is placed on stable support objects, such as cinder blocks, that are placed on the ground. Many color belt promotional breaks (belts before black belt) are power breaks – it’s far easier for an inexperienced person to muster enough energy to break a plank of wood with a power break (note: this doesn’t apply to all breaks). The vast majority of these employ human board members. Often a stronger or more powerful striker can substitute some power with technique and successfully complete the break. Most of the disks that are cataloged are for power breaks. It is very common for black belt tests to use bricks, concrete patio blocks, or multiple planks stacked on support objects to provide challenging downstrokes.

The third method, soft rests, also known as “ki” rests, almost always involves the use of “flat hand” strikes. primarily the palm, as it is easier to get a successful break with forward movement, but sometimes the back of the hand as well. The material is usually supported horizontally at two ends. The crusher raises his hand and drops it without tension or significant muscle tightening, instead relying primarily on gravity to hit the material with his palm. The material is broken in a direct line from the palm of the hand to the other side of the material by a complete transfer of energy all the way. The impact also penetrates a wider, more dispersed area and therefore, from a martial arts perspective, deals more damage than other strikes when delivered to a human opponent. This pause is comparable to hitting a person with a punch, although more energy is transferred to the target than is typically transferred by a mere punch.

Although fundamentally different, the 4th type of pause – the impulse pause – is often confused with a speed pause because the impact device is often moving at high speed, although the success of the pause does not depend on that speed. The transfer of energy from a pulse pause does not come from mass displacement but from wave transfer (e.g. when an ocean wave hits a beach). The mass of the hand, foot, etc. typically does not move through the medium, but only goes as far as necessary to deliver the wave. This results in extremely brief contact with the face of the brick or board and the wave itself causes the face to flex and flex.[3][4]

Linked vs. unlinked (spaced vs. without spaced) [edit]

There are two types of settings for multiple stacked boards: connected (with spacing) and unconnected (without spacing). Unlinked stacks are where multiple items are stacked directly on top of each other.[3][4]

Dowelled stacks are stacks in which multiple elements are stacked with spacers (often called spacers) in between, usually wooden spacers. Unpegged stacking allows for a direct transfer of kinetic energy and the striker must maintain peak power much longer than a pegged stack, as the striker moves down the stack he encounters the resistance of each board individually rather than sufficient power used to create bending and breaking a whole stack with no clearance.

References[ edit ]

(Copy of the Wayback Machine)

The karate chop is a popular feature of many martial arts films. The good guy lands a blow on any part of a fighter’s body, immobilizing them almost instantly. Are such steps in any way realistic? Can you KO someone with a karate punch?

You can knock someone out with a karate punch, but it’s extremely difficult to land a punch like that. Only blows to the vagus nerve or directly to the front or sides of the head are strong enough to knock someone out. The chances of completing such shots are extremely slim, especially for untrained hands.

Read on as we examine the questions: Can you knock someone out with a karate chop.

What is a karate chop?

A karate chop is a martial move that uses the side of the palm as a knife. The “blade” is the area between the beginning of the wrist and the base of the little finger.

Martial artists often use the side of the hand opposite the thumb. However, you can sometimes use the side of the hand holding the (tucked in) thumb for a reverse punch. Karate Chop is used in many martial arts including Kung Fu, Taekwondo, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Muay Thai, etc.

Here is a video demonstration of the Karate Chop:

What to expect when you hit someone with a karate chop

If you hit someone with a karate punch, they will most likely only feel pain, like any other type of body punch.

But can you KO someone with a karate punch?

If the blow is hard enough and reaches the vagus nerve, you can knock the person unconscious for a few seconds. The likelihood of this happening is extremely low in most people, so expecting this to be a standard result is unrealistic.

A strong blow to the head can cause whiplash or concussion if it throws the head back hard. Again, this is a very unlikely outcome. Punches to the ribs, chest, or any other part of the body can cause severe pain, just like a regular punch.

Why it’s unrealistic to knock someone out with a karate chop

It would be nice to replicate the chop as we see it in movies, but it’s impractical for a number of reasons:

Individuals are different

Our anatomy may be similar on a structural level, but differences in physique affect the severity of a karate punch. A blow to the vagus nerve is often the target of most neck punches. However, its position on the neck varies from person to person. Repeating the same neck punch on ten people will produce different results, which may not involve a knockout.

There are other variables

In addition to anatomy, other variables must come together for you to achieve a knockout. First, your slash must have the right amount of power. As with any other punch, the force behind the blow determines the effect.

Second, the target you are attacking must be at the right distance. Real world situations are far more challenging than breaking a few static bricks. A free shot at someone not trying to defend themselves may be successful, but an attacker will be much more agile.

Many parts of the body can absorb karate chops

As mentioned above, most discussions revolve around karate chops around the neck and head (to a far lesser extent). Blows to other parts of the body only cause bruising and pain and nothing more. Elbow punches, fist punches, and leg kicks can produce better results than karate punches, depending on the body part.

The Potential Dangers of Karate Chops

While there’s a very slim chance of knocking someone out with karate punches, you can still do serious (and potentially fatal) damage.

Impacts to the vagus nerve can impair the transmission of impulses to the lungs and heart and can lead to death.

Strong neck blows can also damage the neck veins, carotid arteries, and similar blood vessels and cause death.

A karate punch to the larynx can crush it and kill in minutes (unless there is immediate medical intervention).

Heavy karate bangs on the ribs can result in broken ribs and punctured lungs.

Final Thoughts

So can you knock someone out with a karate punch?

There is a very small chance of knocking out someone with a karate punch. Even seasoned experts can’t hit the vagus nerve on everyone they meet. There is a higher chance of damaging tissue and bone with karate punches.

If you’re looking for a way to immobilize opponents, a blow toward the solar plexus will give you a more realistic chance. In addition, there is less risk of accidentally killing someone or damaging their vertebrae.

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