August 14, 2018 • 44 mins
If you’ve ever seen someone break a stack of boards or concrete blocks with a single karate chop you know what it means to experience awe. Board breaking is indeed cool but there’s also a lot of physics to help it along. Learn all about this secret art.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles W Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there.
And this is stuff you should know all about Mars.
(00:22):
Oh wait, I mean it's all about board breaking, that's right,
board breaking. I gotta keep them straight. Do you want
to explain what you just said? Sure? So. Um, you know,
when we pick our topics, one of us will send
a topic, the other one will send a different topic.
(00:43):
Then we go off and do our research, and then
we come back together and record it. That's the stuff
you should know, way right, that's the way. Um. I
want to preface this by saying we have more than
a thousand episodes that we've done. Okay, to bear that
mind everybody, more than I say you, How Mars Works
was my pick for this week, and uh, I went
(01:05):
about and started studying. I think you did some studying
as well. And then I got an email from you
this morning, early this morning saying, um, we've already done
how Mars Works. Hours of Mars research just totally wasted.
I know so much. I know so much about Mars
right now that it's never No one's ever going to
hear it. I'm going to take it to my grave. Yeah.
(01:28):
So we swapped it out instead with how board breaking works,
which is fascinating if you ask me. Yeah, man, good
find Yeah I thought so too. I believe we covered
cart before. Who knows, Chuck? Who has any idea? Well,
Jill Hurley knows. Yes, Jill Hurley, our minister of status,
usually keeps track of this stuff. But she does. We
(01:50):
should just start emailing her every time we have an
idea instead instead of looking at the spreadsheet that she
sends us exactly like a couple of dopes. Yeah. No,
but board breaking I'm a sure we did not do before. No, uh,
And we might as well go ahead and do a
couple of things. First of all, c o A and say,
(02:12):
do not try to break boards or anything with your
hands and feet unless you were trained to do so. Yes,
don't get inspired by this show. If you are inspired,
be inspired to go take up martial arts because from all,
from everything I can find, it's a really great um
(02:33):
thing to get into martial arts. Yeah, it is. It
teaches you focus and discipline and training and strength and
self confidence and actually, like the injury rate is really
really low, way lower than you would think. Um, so
it's actually pretty good sport to get into. Yeah. And
the other thing to point out early on is, uh,
it is not just boards, but concrete blocks and glass
(02:57):
and ice and what else. Glass I think is much
more just for looks. Yeah. There's this one guy who
who I found because I was kind of looking up
records and things, and I'll get to that later, but
I can't remember his name, but he seems to make
a big show about chopping through a bunch of glass.
If he could punch a hole clear through some glass
(03:20):
without breaking the glass fish shape hole like a cartoon Yeah,
like a bullet hole, but with a fist. Now, that
would be super impressive breaking a bunch of glass. I mean,
that's that's not hard, And we'll find out why it's
not hard later on, because we're going to talk about
the physics of this chuck, which I'm a little psyched about. Yeah.
And another thing that I didn't see in my research
(03:42):
that I always heard, which maybe a wives tale, is
that when they do the thing where they stack a
bunch of boards, that like you're really just breaking the
first board and then the other boards break the other boards.
Is that true? Yeah? Yeah, so that was something that
I came across this. So board breaking, at least in
Japan is called tamashawari. And there's fake tami shiwari, which
(04:08):
is probably of the tamashwari out there, and then there's
actual real tamashwari, which you have to be basically insane
to try, even as like a black belt um karate person.
But what do you mean by fake if instead of fake,
we'll call it physics assisted, Okay, Whereas with like that,
(04:28):
that one percent of tamashawari, it's it is what it
it appears to be. You're you're really punching through like
a big thick piece of wood or something like that. Well,
I think I would love to cover the very beginnings
of this article though, because I thought I had never
heard that story about the the legend of the origins
of pin Jack's a lot take us the story Bill Chuck.
(04:52):
So there's an island called uh bawean Uh in ancient Indonesia,
and this is main mainly legend, but who knows it
might have come down like this, But supposedly there was
a lady there named Rama Sukana, who was washing her
close in the river, looked up saw some monkeys fighting
(05:12):
in the trees and really sort of got into studying
them and how they fought each other. Started practicing that
out by the river banks. Took so much time. She
came home and her husband was ticked off and was like,
where's my dinner? And because this is ancient times, it's
fully okay for me to two abuse you because my
(05:35):
dinner is not on the table. And she was like,
oh no, no, no, I now know the way of
the monkey. And she she fought him back and it worked,
and it kept working. He kept coming at her and
she kept just going kabat foot and oh ah, right,
and she kept putting him on his butt so much
so that he said, master trained me. Yeah. See that's
(06:01):
where the story loses me, where he's just he gives
up and says, you're pretty good at this. I gotta admit,
what do you say you teach the old man? Right?
I think that's uh, that's what they call when you
can't beat them, join them. Yeah, but it's a good story.
And as the origins of the Indonesian martial art, pent
jacks a lot, yeah, which I thought that was very
(06:23):
very odd that this was included in this article because
I looked up pen jack, so pen Jack's a lot,
and it looked like it was very much into fighting
with knives and spears, way more than breaking boards are
using open handed stuff, and that's no monkey stuff. No,
but I think it is based on strikes in the
(06:44):
animal kingdom, not just monkeys, but like cobra strikes and
and using like those kind of like approaches, but rather
than with your empty hand, it's you're using knives. So
I don't know why that was included instead. Karate um
is much more associated with board breaking. Again, there's a
Japanese word for board breaking, tami shawari. Yeah, and did
(07:04):
you know that cobra kai actually means knife wielding cobra?
Does it really? Yeah? Well, I mean it could. It
could be like cobra and knife, and you could just
interpret it his knife wheeling cobra rather than a knife
made out of a cobra. Could you imagine anything more
terrifying than a cobra holding a knife? No? No, maybe
a deranged karate monkey with the cobra wielding and knife,
(07:31):
or an alligator with an assault rifle. Yeah, that's pretty scary,
pretty scary. So karate is meant to be done with
open hand. It actually means open hand, empty hand, right, yeah,
one of the two. Yeah, And the origins of karate
apparently came from when the peasantry was stripped of their
(07:52):
weapons in the sixteenth and seventeenth century because the Japanese government,
feudal government, said, we're worried you guys don't don't really
like our policies as much as you pretend to, and
we're afraid you're gonna rebel, so we're gonna take all
your weapons. So they developed a empty hand technique for fighting,
which was karate, and again part of karate. Over the years,
(08:15):
I'm not exactly sure where temi shawari originator when I
should say, but over the years, the idea of breaking
boards is a demonstration of skill and training and focus
and strength um has developed to where now to me
it's basically synonymous with martial arts. Yeah, breaking some boards,
(08:38):
uh yeah, and they had in here. I'm not so
sure this is right that they turned to breaking boards
because hitting people wasn't a thing that you should do.
But I don't think that's quite right, is it. I'm
not sure, Man, I really am not sure that's what
I'm saying, Like the origin of it, no idea. I
did see that there's um, you know, it's been around
for a little while, and there are some customary and
(09:00):
traditional like um things with the board, like for example,
you're supposed to use cedar specific type of cedar or
drake um, and there's things like that. But no, I
didn't see where it came from or exactly why other
than somebody. Maybe somebody was punching through a door and
that looked pretty cool, and so they started punching through doors,
and then the doors got smaller, and then you have
(09:21):
Tamashawari board breaking. Well, what we do know that there
is a human instinct to not punch something uh with
no give, Like there is an ingrained instinct to pull
back when you go to hit a wall or to
punch a board or something like that, or a person even. Yeah,
(09:43):
and we'll talk a little bit more about that in
a few minutes. But I thought this is really interesting
this other article you sent just about how strong bones
are and kind of what happens when you hit another person. Yeah,
So I mean, if you stop and think about it
breaking through a board, it looks awesome because it is
pretty impressive. But your your bone and your hand and
(10:05):
your foot and your leg are actually way more impressive
than would because they are capable of doing some amazing stuff.
And if you stop and think about it, your bone
is capable of withstanding tremendous amounts of pressure and force.
But at the same time, you can use that bone
to break another bone, which is kind of paradoxical, you know. Yeah,
(10:30):
but it's pretty neat. So yeah, there's there's if you
look at bone, there's a lot of stress you can
put it on before it's going to break. Yeah, so,
uh a cubic inch of bone. And they point out
this article in principle, I'm sure there are, you know,
people like Samuel Jackson an Unbreakable Mr Glass, Sure he
(10:53):
had a physical condition. I think they're doing another movie
of of him and the guy from uh, what was
the most recent one that Split? Split. Yeah, they're doing
like basically a sequel to Split featuring Mr Glass and
Bruce Willis. It's all, oh, wow, that's gonna be good.
It looks pretty good to me so far. I went
(11:15):
back and rewatched Unbreakable, and I was like, this is
much better than I thought it was the first time.
It's a good movie. I totally agree. I think people
expected well, I think it it got it to do
at the time, but it was a movie about the
beginnings of a It was just an ultralong origin story, right,
which you didn't realize until about two thirds of the
(11:36):
way through, you know, and then you really got it
at the end. But yeah, I think everybody was expecting,
give me another sixth sense, baby, kind of need that jolt,
and uh, he just never delivered like he did on
the sixth sense. So he's kind of cursed by it,
which is why you have to go back years later
and see it again. You're like, oh, now that I'm
out of like the six cents junkiness, I I can
(11:56):
appreciate Unbreakable and the Village too. I saw that in
le two and I'm like, this is better than I
thought it was. Yeah. That was Manky's pick on movie Crush.
Oh that's right, yeah, yeah, that was yes, totally kind
of on the nose for Airmankey. Yeah. Um, all right,
So Mr glass aside, though, in principle, a bone can
bear a load of nineteen thousand pounds or more, and
(12:21):
that makes it as your correct article said four times
as strong as concrete, whereas R said forty times. Yeah,
who cares, which is not correct. Right, So this this
is I think a Live science article I found this in.
But if you balanced five American pickup trucks, says standard
(12:41):
pickup truck. So I'm just gonna go with a one fifty. Yeah.
Well I wasn't gonna say for it. I was just
you know, if you were in the know, I was
just going to leave it at that. But if you
balance five Ford f one fifties nose to tail um
on top of your armbone, theoretically it should be able
(13:04):
to hold that up. You would wish that you were dead,
but your armbone would just be like, oh god, this
I'm not gonna break, and it might not break. But
again the point is this. That is the amount of
actual weight, but weight can actually be combined in other
ways and delivered an other way. So if you delivered
(13:25):
far far less than that with um a lot more
velocity um, your your bone would just snap right in two.
So there's a lot of variables they're including not just
how that amount of weight is delivered in what what
kind of force, but also your age, your health. There's
a lot of stuff, but like you said, generally speaking,
(13:48):
your bone, a cubic inch of bone could bear nine
pounds or about eight thousand, six hundreds of weight. Yeah.
And although this is gets away from board breaking, it
was in the article sent and I thought it was
super interesting. When it comes to getting in a fistfight
or boxing. When someone gets knocked out by a punch,
(14:08):
it's not necessarily because they get hit so hard in
the head. It's that there if you hit someone in
the cheek, you know, right there, and the and the
kisser and the jaw, it's the head spin that does it.
So if your head spins around, uh from zero to
forty three RPMs in a second, your your head stresses
(14:33):
out and the brain shuts down as a protection. Yeah,
I had no idea of getting knocked out chance if
it's up to RPMs. So that's why boxers built up
their neck muscles so their head doesn't snap to the
side as much. Yeah, totally had no idea about any
(14:53):
of that, or getting hit in the stomach, Like when
the wind is knocked out of you, that's a spasm
of your diaphragm right right. And the reason why you
can make somebody's head spin like that, or make or
cause somebody's diaphragm to spas them is because you're concentrating
a tremendous amount of force in a fairly small area.
Like if you look at the front if you make
(15:15):
a fist and then look at the front of your
fingers where the fist makes contact with whatever that's that's
actually a relatively small area that you're putting a tremendous
amount of mass and velocity behind. And you combine those two,
you multiply those two, and you have force. And humans
can can concentrate a pretty pretty significant amount of force.
(15:37):
This Life Science article found that a professional boxer could
generate about five thousand Newton's of force, and a Newton,
by the way, is the amount of force it takes
to move one kilogram one meter, which makes me want
to go move a kilogram a meter so bad just
to be like, I just used a Newton. I just
(15:58):
exerted a Newton right there? You know? Is that just
me that you don't want to do that too? So um.
A boxer can generate about five thousand Newton's of force
with a punch, which is about half of a ton
of um of force exerted on the Earth's surface. Okay,
(16:21):
half a ton of force in your little your little
fist right there. And because four sequels mass times velocity,
if you can generate more um velocity and you and
you can use more mass, you can generate more force.
And we'll talk more about that later on with the physics.
(16:41):
But that's just a little teaser. Yeah, And this is
also the point, and I've pointed this out before, I
believe where I would like to say that I am
forty seven years old and I have never punched or
hit anyone in my life. Nor been punched or hit.
That's great, man, never been in a fight. I kind
of feel like I should get in a fight. I
(17:01):
don't think so. I think you should feel the opposite
of that. You should be proud of it. Yeah, just
be like, I've never been in a fight. I'm gonna
die having never been in a fist fight. You definitely
don't need to. Don't listen to fight Club. It was
made up, by the way. All right, should we take
a break, Yeah, all right, We'll take a break and
we'll talk more about board board breaking right after this,
(17:40):
all right, Chuck so um when you actually break aboard,
we can tell you how to do that. But again
I want to preface it with like, just don't don't
go do this, don't listen to us and do this. Like,
if you want to do this, go check out martial arts,
go to your nearest O Joe and see what's going down.
That's right, But just for the sake of sharing information,
(18:04):
that's what we're doing here. Okay. Yes, So if you
if you watch somebody break aboard, you're gonna see that
there's actually like a fairly uniform shape to them. They're
usually about a foot wide, they're usually kind of squarish,
and there's something like about three quarters of an inch thick.
(18:27):
And again, like I said, traditionally, um, the wood is
supposed to be cedar, but I think these days most people,
uh say pine. They use pine because it's a soft
wood and it breaks easier than a hardwood like oak
or something like that. Yeah, And they also suggest to
not have like a big not right in the center
of this board or hopefully anywhere on the board, but
(18:49):
definitely not where you're punching, because the center is where
you want to be punching. And this is usually either
held by somebody or you see them set up sometimes
with on on stands and stuff being held. Yeah, if
you watch Karate Kid too, when daniels Son breaks through
those six sheets of ice, I don't remember that at all.
(19:11):
They have It was like in a bar. He took
a bet Actually, Mr Miyagi kind of forced him to
take the bet um because he was being betted against
by Mr Miyagi's rivals. Nephew, Okay, he's got to see it,
but he got a good memory of Karate Kid too.
I just watched it like an hour ago, okay, but yeah,
(19:33):
they had like a stand that they put these sheets
of ice in. It was pretty awesome, pretty cool little gizmo.
I don't think there's any reason to make it unless
you do kind of have a bar where people break
ice and stuff. But it's uh, I just thought it
was pretty cool. But for the most part, you see
somebody just standing there holding it like it's like a
punching target or something. Yeah, and there's I mean, it
(19:54):
kind of depends, that's if you're punching straight through with
your knuckles. You've also seen things stacked like spread between
two bricks, a bunch of wood stacked and you can
use a few techniques here at the hammer fist, which
is like if you were just pounding on a you know,
on a table with your with your hand like hulk smash, yeah,
hulk smash or what's known as palm heel. And that's
(20:17):
when you yeah, with with your palm. Yeah. If I
saw somebody break a board like that, I would be
truly impressed that I have not seen. Have you seen
somebody break a board in real life? No? Not not
in person? No I haven't either. Uh. And then the
old knife hand, which is the classic karate chop. The
(20:39):
reason why you want to hit the center of the
board is myriad number one. That's where the least amount
of strength is in the board. It's not around the edges,
it's more in the center. And depending on how you're hitting,
let's let's just go with the good old fashioned karate chop.
What's that one called the knife hand? Yeah, and when
(20:59):
you can all so do this these these uh with
kicks you can which to me it just seems terribly scary.
I don't know about you, but like I don't want
anything to happen to my ankle or my heel or
my achilles heel. Or any my toes. Nothing like that.
Like the the punching breaking with your hands or fists,
(21:20):
that's that's cool enough, But like your foot, I'd be
very It would take a tremendous amount of training for
me to get to that point. All right. So we're
going with the standard karate chop, right, And when you're
doing the standardkarate chop, so the board is going to
be flat relative to the earth, and you are going
to bring your fist down or your your karate chop
(21:42):
down going with the grain, you will have a tremendously
difficult time breaking the board against the grain. You want
to go bring the line of your hand parallel with
the grain. Yeah, I didn't fully get that, Okay. So
if you have a flat board in front of you,
you're you're on your knees and you're like about to
chop it, and you hold your hold your fist up
(22:05):
like that, or hold your karate chop up like this
right in front of you, and you start to bring
it down. The grain of the wood should be going
the same direction as your hand. But what I mean
that makes sense if your hand is in karate chop
mode because there's a clear line. But what about when
it's a fist. I don't know. Maybe it matters less
(22:27):
because it's a fist. I could see it mattering more
because there's so much less surface area that's making contact
with the karate chop than like with the whole fist.
So I would guess the grain definitely would matter more
with that, al Right, But regardless supposedly they say going
with the grain is easier, Yeah, it's just easier in life.
That's a life note. Go with the grain, go with
(22:49):
the flow. Actually I don't necessarily I don't necessarily espouse that, agreed. Okay. So, um,
one of the other things you're gonna learn is um focus.
And you kind of touched on this earlier, but you
were kind of talking about how you you want to
stop You like, if you if you go to hit
a board or a piece of wood or a piece
(23:11):
of concrete or something like that, your brain's gonna scream
stop dummy. Yeah, So how do you get over that
when you go into training where you're trained to break boards? Well,
I mean you you focus. You try to focus as
if the the board that you were breaking as several
inches behind the actual board. To participitate or encourage that
(23:34):
follow through. But they also make a very good point
about breathing. And if you saw Karate Kid, what does
he say with all everything, remember, breathe then breathe out. Well,
they actually do that to prepare for the ice breaking. Yeah,
so it's breathing is very important and then you know
if you hear that, yeah, I mean that's just not
for showboating and flair. Uh, the same way as a
(23:57):
tennis player might grunt when they hit, like Steffi Graph, No,
she had, she had one of the best. Yea or no,
who's sell Us? Didn't she have a really good grunt?
I thought it was Steffi graph I don't remember. I
definitely remember sell Us had a Yeah. Is that your impression? Yeah?
That was my Monica sell Us. Okay man. Remember she
(24:19):
got stabbed on the court. Wasn't that crazy? No, I
don't remember that at all. Yeah, he had. She had.
She was attacked and stabbed a tennis match by a
crazed fan. Yeah, and it really derailed her career, I
would imagine. So, I mean, like if you if you're
not safe on like the tennis court doing your thing,
it takes a lot of concentration to play tennis. You
(24:41):
don't want to think about what's like coming up behind you,
you know, while you're hitting a return. Good God, And
I think most people take up tennis because you have
a near chance of not being stabbed. Yes, it is
a pretty stabbed free pursuit. Uh So, anyway, where were
we were talking about how um breathing in the kia
(25:05):
That is all to do with the focus, like bringing
that whole routine together with the breaths and the exclamation
as you punch supposedly a few inches behind where the
board is. Yeah, and I actually looked that up where
he came from or what the point is, and there's
that's supposedly a kind of an embellishment or a flourish
(25:27):
or on the actual breathing. You don't actually have to
make a sound or say a word or say something
that sounds that sounds like a word that you you're
actually expelling breath very quickly. And the reason why you're
doing this because you're meant to be focusing on your
breath so that when you actually punch or bring your
hand down or kick or whatever, what your what your
(25:50):
brain is pretending it's doing is breathing, and your your
hand or your foot motion is just kind of a byproduct,
and it distracts you from worrying or thinking about pulling
your punch, because there's a real problem with pulling your punch.
If you stop, if you if you pull your punch,
if you try to ease off on the speed right
(26:12):
before you hit, you're still gonna hit. But rather than
driving through the board or the concrete or whatever it
is you're the force of that is actually going to
bounce off the board, won't break, and it will reverberate
through the board and then back up into your hand,
and it's going to hurt terribly impossibly even break one
(26:33):
of your bones. So that natural instinct to pull up
is what ends up causing the injury. Ironically, yes, so
your brain is trying to make itself safe, but your
brain hasn't really thought things through. But if you follow through,
like you said, if you focus on hitting a place
that's actually on the other side, beyond the board, you're
you're more likely to keep going through to follow through.
(26:55):
And another reason why this is a good idea is
because I think somebody, some physicists figured out that the
peak of a blow or a strike or something like
that occurs at about a mark of the arc or
of the downward motion or of the motion. Right, So
(27:17):
it's not like when you punch through or something that's
when you hit. It's actually happening right before possibly you
hit the board. So if you're if your brain is
saying don't punch that it's gonna hurt, and you already
just naturally aren't delivering of the blow right then anyway,
you're really gonna have your hand bounce off and it's
(27:38):
going to be a problem. Should we take another break?
Hey man? Why not? All right, we'll talk a little
bit more about that physics, uh in a in a
very special astronaut right after this. Alright, Chuck, we're back,
(28:09):
and I think I speak for all of the world,
and I say, what do astronauts have to do with this?
So this was pretty interesting to me. And apparently in
the seventies a couple of physicists uh dudes that were
also martial artists I decided to sort of look into
the physics of board breaking and do that research. In
(28:30):
what they came up with was speed is the is
the overriding factor when it comes to board breaking, right,
Because you mentioned earlier, you know, the more you increase
that velocity or that force, or the more you increase
the velocity, the more you're going to increase the force. Right,
And you can increase your velocity just by doing something
as simple as pulling your fists back further before you
(28:54):
bring it down, give you more room, more more of
a head start, or something like that. Yeah, and this
is aim. And like it's the same with anything, whether
you're cutting a chopping a tree, or hitting a baseball.
You do you hear about bat speed and baseball. You know,
you want your punch to be as fast as possible,
not just to catch your opponent off guard, but because
(29:14):
you generate more force in the end, right, And you
can also recruit more mass from different parts of your body.
And it's you can recruit mass more easily with a
kick than with a punch, which is why you generate
more Newton's of force with a kick them with a punch,
because you have more muscle mass that you can draw
(29:35):
from to direct out through your foot in a kick. Yeah,
and you always to hear about with kicks, punches, golf swings,
baseball bats. It's like they say, it's in in the hips. Yeah,
that's what Actually, that's what um Daniel Son said. Really,
there's a real lesson here in Hollywood history. Uh So apparently,
(30:00):
if you are a typical beginner in kata te, you
can get up to about twenty per second with with
your hand speed, which uh, in terms of math or maths,
is enough to break a one inch pine board. Yeah,
And I looked it up at I saw that something
about like Newton's to break a pine board. Okay, so
(30:25):
good and from what I saw, and basically any beginner
can walk up after about five ten minutes of instruction
and break through a single pine board typically if they
do it right right. So, if you're out there saying
Chuck still hasn't talked about the special astronaut one of
these physicists in the seventies, his name was Ronald Ron
McNair and he was also an astronaut, and he was
(30:48):
also played the saxomaphone, and he was all set to
record the very first recorded piece of music in space
in history when he boarded the A Shuttle Challenger and
as a black belt and saxomaphone player, and sadly we
all know how that ended. So he was the physicist
(31:10):
who did this research on board breaking as it turns out.
Have you have you ever been to Kennedy Space Center,
Which one's Kennedy, the one on Cape Canaveral. Yeah, yeah,
I think so they have is they have a museum there, um,
just fantastic museum. And in part of it they have
like personal effects of some of the uh of all
(31:32):
of actually the Challenger and the Columbia astronauts who were lost,
and one of them is Ronald McNair's like karate uniform. Interesting. Yeah,
it's pretty it's really amazing to see the way they
have this kind of memorial set up. It's it's it'll
bring it tear to your eye. Yeah. I mean if
I went it was before that even happened, I would
have been very young. Oh yeah yeah. And I think
(31:54):
that the memorials even fairly newish. So yeah, yeah, it's
definitely worth a visits for for just that even but
the whole the whole museum is really great. Yeah. We
should do an episode about the space shuttle disaster at
some point. I think you're right. It would be a good,
a good somber one because we did one on the
I S S, so maybe we could do one on
space shuttles in general. Yeah, all right. Uh so Ron McNair,
(32:17):
long story short, he was so good he could get
his karate chop up to forty six ft per second,
which equates to about twenty eight hundred Newton's of force,
which is about a quarter ton. Yeah that's a lot. Yeah,
because they say it takes nineteen hundred tons I'm sorry
Newton's to break a one and a half inch concrete slab,
(32:38):
and he he could put forth Newton's right. So there
you have it. It's really just physics. So it's like
at this point Chuck in in research where I was like, okay,
wait a minute, it's just physics. Is this just like
like um circus stuff? Is this the circus arts? Really? Is?
It's just fake? And did Chuck dupe me somehow weird
(33:00):
into doing another circus article? So the the the thing
is is, I know it's not like there are physics involved,
and you have to know what you're doing, and there's
definitely a wrong way, and you can injure yourself, especially
if you pull your punch. The more boards there are,
the easier it would be to hurt yourself, depending on
how they're stacked. But it would be wrong to say
(33:24):
that it is that physics does not very much aid
in this. It's not a trick. It's not a trick,
and it is very well thought through. And the more
boards you add, or the different materials you add, obviously
the more skill you're demonstrating. But the reason why physics
plays a part is things like the grain, Like breaking
(33:46):
along the grain. That means that the break is going
to occur along the grain. It's gonna be a lot
easier for that break to propagate. Um things like if
you look at a board. The reason why you're using
something like pine rather than a hard would it's not
because hardwoods are like harder, they're more resilient. The pine
is going to be more brittle. So when you hit something,
(34:07):
you're creating a resonance in it. And I think this
is in the Bridges episode where if you get something
into its natural resonance and the natural resonance is overwhelmed,
it will break apart. That's what you're doing when you
break a border, where you break concrete or something like that,
you're transferring force from your body into this this inanimate object,
(34:30):
and you're in doing so, you're creating a resonance in
it that is hopefully enough to overcome the objects natural
resonance and break it apart. And it's you know, when
you say it like that, it seems like a slow process,
but this happens very quickly. With oak or something like that.
It's it's much more resilient, it's much more elastic, and
so it's going to resonate more than break it's compared
(34:54):
to say like pine. So there's another example of how
physics um comes in. And then also if you look
at things like five stacked boards that somebody's punching through,
they're not five stacked boards one right on top of
each other. Even the most battle hardened sense a in
the universe would think two or three times before trying
(35:18):
that and would probably be like, I'm not going to
do that today. You'd be a moron to do that
because most people would not be able to break through that.
But if you have space between them, that changes everything. Yes,
So is that true? Is it is it the boards
that are breaking the other boards? Yes? And are you
really just breaking that first boarder? Is it the first few? No?
(35:39):
Because if you think about it, if you stop right,
if like you if you're the place where you're going
to break through stops like say, right before the third board,
you're you're going to break your hand on that third board.
So it does take discipline and focus and thought to
where you're punching beyond that fifth board. Right, Um, but yeah,
(36:00):
when you break through that first one, you're punching through
to the next one and punching through the next one.
So as each board gives way, it's helping break the
next one. But really it's getting out of the way
and you're just punching through another board, and then that
one gets out of the way, and there's another one
you're punching through. But it's all in just one smooth
motion as you punch beyond that say, fifth board. But
(36:21):
if they're all stacked up right next to each other,
you're not punching through five five boards. You're punching through
one board five boards thick, and then that does not
have that same effect because you're trying to punch the
whole thing all at once and your hands is going
to turn to mush. So in theory, uh, you would
only be able to punch through as many boards as
your arm punch length. Yes, right, Well, so here's the deal.
(36:48):
Is board breaking just for show? Is that an act?
Is there any merit to it whatsoever? And the answer
is sort of back and forth depending on who you
talk to. I think there are some martial arts purists, Well,
it depends. There's probably purists on both sides that say
this is an ancient tradition that we still like to practice. Uh.
(37:10):
It's good for obviously recruiting people to your dojo if
you are a master board breaker in your town, But
then other people say, no, you know it's it is
only for show. Bruce leeve And said, supposedly boards don't
hit back, Like what you should be doing is training
and focusing on things and not sort of like a
(37:31):
side show trick, even though it's not a trick trick. Uh.
And then it doesn't do anything to further martial arts.
It's just sort of a thing to get attention. And
I liked how this article kind of put it. It It
was saying, like you actually teach kids that they can
get praised for doing unimportant things like breaking through some boards,
where really they should be being praised or being trained
(37:53):
to do stuff that's actually useful, right, Like it it's
it's definitely not a true gauge of your progress as
a martial artist. No, But like I was reading about
the ninety six Tokyo Karate Open, I think, and it
um if you wanted to progress to the next round,
you had to fight, and then you had to break
(38:14):
some boards and you had to break like X number
of boards and then you can move on the next round,
fight break some more boards. So it's not like there's
it's just totally useless in the martial arts world. And
the whole reason it's there is strictly to attract new students.
Although I think it really works for that, like it
does have practical use, But outside of the martial arts
(38:35):
like competition world, does it I think is the larger point. Yeah,
I'd like to hear from martial artists and get a
true insider's take on what they think about it. Yeah,
same here. Would you ever take any martial arts? I
took taekwondo as a youngster, and I was like, wait
a minute, wait a minute, We're just like kicking the air.
I want to like, what are we doing here? And
(38:57):
it became very clear that there was a long path
I had to me to wherever I wanted to be,
and I was like, I'm not doing this. I'm gonna
go home and eat some twigs. Peanut butter or caramel
peanut butter. I eat caramel if it was around, but
peanut butter is always my favorite. Yeah. Did they still
make those peanut butter twigs? Yes, they do so good.
(39:17):
I think that's it. Huh. Yeah. I looked up some
records just quickly here, like world records, to see what
was out there, and don't bother unless you have hours
to sort through this, because there are literally dozens and
dozens and dozens of variations of world records. Apparently you
can just make anything up, and if you're the first
(39:39):
person to do that, like there are records like a
couple that punched through this much glass and this much time,
or a man who who punched through a lot of
them are time based, like this many pieces of glass
while humming the theme from mash uh like, it seems
(39:59):
like can just make anything up and and get I mean,
there's glass breaking ice boards, there's kicks, there's head stuff,
hand stuff, concrete. It's just all over the place. And
I finally gave up when I saw a record for
a guy breaking boards in free fall. So he skydived
(40:19):
and was surrounded by skydivers that would float up to
him and hold boards in front of his face. It
was very intimidating, looking like just shoving these boards in
his face while he's floating, and he would gather himself
up enough to punch through the board. And that's when
I was like, I'm out. I think I'm done. That
guy's the world record holder for awesome. That's pretty great.
(40:41):
I don't even think about that. I want to combine
my passion for skydiving with my passion for karate. Yeah,
it was pretty dumb. Last thing I had was there's
a legend that if you are in the UFC, the
Ultimate Fighting Championship or whatever, and there's a rule against
downward elbow strikes because it's it's thought that they're possibly lethal,
(41:06):
so they're an illegal move and they The legend is
is that the reason is because the UFC commissioner was
at a board breaking competition and saw somebody break a
bunch of like boards or concrete with their elbow and
did not realize that there's a lot of physics involved
and went back and like immediately made this rule no
(41:27):
downward elbow strikes. It's obviously you can kill a man
like that because I saw some dude breaks and boards
with his elbow. Isn't that interesting? Yeah, I don't watch
uh you need that stuff, So I don't know. It's
just so brutal. Man. Yeah, I can watch boxing all
day long, but ultimate fighting it's, oh my god, it's brutal.
I used to love boxing growing up. It's it holds up. Yeah.
(41:50):
Just I think when when the heavyweight division sort of
got less interesting post Tyson. Oh yeah, yeah, I just
I was into a girl going up with like the
legends like Marvin Hagler and Roberto Duran and Sugarade Leonard
and Tyson and Spinks and Homes. It just ali. Of
course it was. It was one of the premier sports.
(42:11):
And it's just I don't know. When you when I'm
trying to figure out which clich Ko brother is who,
I'm just kind of done. So yeah, I don't know
anything about it. I guess post Tyson, now that I
think about, I don't know anybody's name post Tyson. To
tell you the truth, as far as heavyweights are concerned,
there's a bunch of clitch cos that's all. Okay, Well
(42:33):
that explain to it. Clitch cos Well, if you want
to know more about board breaking, go get into martial arts.
I strongly recommend it, even though I didn't. Don't make
the same mistake I did. Ah, And since I said
that it's time for listener mail, alright, I'm gonna call
this pin setters. We heard from quite a few people
(42:53):
who were pin setters or had relatives that were pin setters,
and this one I thought was very sweet. Just enjoy
jobs of bygone eras guys. And I remembered that my
dad once worked as a pin setter and his ute.
I called him and talked to him about his experiences
after your show, and here a few highlights the nine
sixty and he was twelve. This is Cleveland, Ohio, and
(43:16):
he remembered that this particular bowling alley was the last one,
I guess in Cleveland to convert to automatic setting. He
was paid two cents of frame or twenty cents per game. Uh.
Bowlers would slide nickels, dimes, and quarters down the lane
as a tip. Oh that's pretty cool. Yeah, And you
had to be quick to snatch up your tip because
(43:36):
sometimes they would try to snipe you with a ball.
I guess awful setters were responsible for three to four
lanes at a time, and he worked on a slightly
elevated catwalk. My dad was hit several times with pins
and he said it was just part of the job,
and the bowlers made him mad. He would offset one
of the rear pins to decrease the chance of a
strike for him sticking into the man. This is from
(44:00):
Ray Hovorka, and he says, thanks a lot. My dad
is seventy now and always lights up when he gets
a chance to regale in his youth. So thank you
Ray Hovorka and Mr Hovorka for your work as a
pin setter. Captain Doc Havorca Esquire. That's raised dad's name. Now, Okay,
So if you want to tell us some cool story
(44:23):
your dad told you, we love those. You can get
in touch with us through social media. Just go to
our website Stuff you Should Know dot com uh and
you can also send us an email. Just send it
off to Stuff podcast How Stuff Works dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
(44:44):
how Stuff Works to
Welcome to Stuff you should know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles W Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there.
And this is stuff you should know all about Mars.
(00:22):
Oh wait, I mean it's all about board breaking, that's right,
board breaking. I gotta keep them straight. Do you want
to explain what you just said? Sure? So. Um, you know,
when we pick our topics, one of us will send
a topic, the other one will send a different topic.
(00:43):
Then we go off and do our research, and then
we come back together and record it. That's the stuff
you should know, way right, that's the way. Um. I
want to preface this by saying we have more than
a thousand episodes that we've done. Okay, to bear that
mind everybody, more than I say you, How Mars Works
was my pick for this week, and uh, I went
(01:05):
about and started studying. I think you did some studying
as well. And then I got an email from you
this morning, early this morning saying, um, we've already done
how Mars Works. Hours of Mars research just totally wasted.
I know so much. I know so much about Mars
right now that it's never No one's ever going to
hear it. I'm going to take it to my grave. Yeah.
(01:28):
So we swapped it out instead with how board breaking works,
which is fascinating if you ask me. Yeah, man, good
find Yeah I thought so too. I believe we covered
cart before. Who knows, Chuck? Who has any idea? Well,
Jill Hurley knows. Yes, Jill Hurley, our minister of status,
usually keeps track of this stuff. But she does. We
(01:50):
should just start emailing her every time we have an
idea instead instead of looking at the spreadsheet that she
sends us exactly like a couple of dopes. Yeah. No,
but board breaking I'm a sure we did not do before. No, uh,
And we might as well go ahead and do a
couple of things. First of all, c o A and say,
(02:12):
do not try to break boards or anything with your
hands and feet unless you were trained to do so. Yes,
don't get inspired by this show. If you are inspired,
be inspired to go take up martial arts because from all,
from everything I can find, it's a really great um
(02:33):
thing to get into martial arts. Yeah, it is. It
teaches you focus and discipline and training and strength and
self confidence and actually, like the injury rate is really
really low, way lower than you would think. Um, so
it's actually pretty good sport to get into. Yeah. And
the other thing to point out early on is, uh,
it is not just boards, but concrete blocks and glass
(02:57):
and ice and what else. Glass I think is much
more just for looks. Yeah. There's this one guy who
who I found because I was kind of looking up
records and things, and I'll get to that later, but
I can't remember his name, but he seems to make
a big show about chopping through a bunch of glass.
If he could punch a hole clear through some glass
(03:20):
without breaking the glass fish shape hole like a cartoon Yeah,
like a bullet hole, but with a fist. Now, that
would be super impressive breaking a bunch of glass. I mean,
that's that's not hard, And we'll find out why it's
not hard later on, because we're going to talk about
the physics of this chuck, which I'm a little psyched about. Yeah.
And another thing that I didn't see in my research
(03:42):
that I always heard, which maybe a wives tale, is
that when they do the thing where they stack a
bunch of boards, that like you're really just breaking the
first board and then the other boards break the other boards.
Is that true? Yeah? Yeah, so that was something that
I came across this. So board breaking, at least in
Japan is called tamashawari. And there's fake tami shiwari, which
(04:08):
is probably of the tamashwari out there, and then there's
actual real tamashwari, which you have to be basically insane
to try, even as like a black belt um karate person.
But what do you mean by fake if instead of fake,
we'll call it physics assisted, Okay, Whereas with like that,
(04:28):
that one percent of tamashawari, it's it is what it
it appears to be. You're you're really punching through like
a big thick piece of wood or something like that. Well,
I think I would love to cover the very beginnings
of this article though, because I thought I had never
heard that story about the the legend of the origins
of pin Jack's a lot take us the story Bill Chuck.
(04:52):
So there's an island called uh bawean Uh in ancient Indonesia,
and this is main mainly legend, but who knows it
might have come down like this, But supposedly there was
a lady there named Rama Sukana, who was washing her
close in the river, looked up saw some monkeys fighting
(05:12):
in the trees and really sort of got into studying
them and how they fought each other. Started practicing that
out by the river banks. Took so much time. She
came home and her husband was ticked off and was like,
where's my dinner? And because this is ancient times, it's
fully okay for me to two abuse you because my
(05:35):
dinner is not on the table. And she was like,
oh no, no, no, I now know the way of
the monkey. And she she fought him back and it worked,
and it kept working. He kept coming at her and
she kept just going kabat foot and oh ah, right,
and she kept putting him on his butt so much
so that he said, master trained me. Yeah. See that's
(06:01):
where the story loses me, where he's just he gives
up and says, you're pretty good at this. I gotta admit,
what do you say you teach the old man? Right?
I think that's uh, that's what they call when you
can't beat them, join them. Yeah, but it's a good story.
And as the origins of the Indonesian martial art, pent
jacks a lot, yeah, which I thought that was very
(06:23):
very odd that this was included in this article because
I looked up pen jack, so pen Jack's a lot,
and it looked like it was very much into fighting
with knives and spears, way more than breaking boards are
using open handed stuff, and that's no monkey stuff. No,
but I think it is based on strikes in the
(06:44):
animal kingdom, not just monkeys, but like cobra strikes and
and using like those kind of like approaches, but rather
than with your empty hand, it's you're using knives. So
I don't know why that was included instead. Karate um
is much more associated with board breaking. Again, there's a
Japanese word for board breaking, tami shawari. Yeah, and did
(07:04):
you know that cobra kai actually means knife wielding cobra?
Does it really? Yeah? Well, I mean it could. It
could be like cobra and knife, and you could just
interpret it his knife wheeling cobra rather than a knife
made out of a cobra. Could you imagine anything more
terrifying than a cobra holding a knife? No? No, maybe
a deranged karate monkey with the cobra wielding and knife,
(07:31):
or an alligator with an assault rifle. Yeah, that's pretty scary,
pretty scary. So karate is meant to be done with
open hand. It actually means open hand, empty hand, right, yeah,
one of the two. Yeah, And the origins of karate
apparently came from when the peasantry was stripped of their
(07:52):
weapons in the sixteenth and seventeenth century because the Japanese government,
feudal government, said, we're worried you guys don't don't really
like our policies as much as you pretend to, and
we're afraid you're gonna rebel, so we're gonna take all
your weapons. So they developed a empty hand technique for fighting,
which was karate, and again part of karate. Over the years,
(08:15):
I'm not exactly sure where temi shawari originator when I
should say, but over the years, the idea of breaking
boards is a demonstration of skill and training and focus
and strength um has developed to where now to me
it's basically synonymous with martial arts. Yeah, breaking some boards,
(08:38):
uh yeah, and they had in here. I'm not so
sure this is right that they turned to breaking boards
because hitting people wasn't a thing that you should do.
But I don't think that's quite right, is it. I'm
not sure, Man, I really am not sure that's what
I'm saying, Like the origin of it, no idea. I
did see that there's um, you know, it's been around
for a little while, and there are some customary and
(09:00):
traditional like um things with the board, like for example,
you're supposed to use cedar specific type of cedar or
drake um, and there's things like that. But no, I
didn't see where it came from or exactly why other
than somebody. Maybe somebody was punching through a door and
that looked pretty cool, and so they started punching through doors,
and then the doors got smaller, and then you have
(09:21):
Tamashawari board breaking. Well, what we do know that there
is a human instinct to not punch something uh with
no give, Like there is an ingrained instinct to pull
back when you go to hit a wall or to
punch a board or something like that, or a person even. Yeah,
(09:43):
and we'll talk a little bit more about that in
a few minutes. But I thought this is really interesting
this other article you sent just about how strong bones
are and kind of what happens when you hit another person. Yeah,
So I mean, if you stop and think about it
breaking through a board, it looks awesome because it is
pretty impressive. But your your bone and your hand and
(10:05):
your foot and your leg are actually way more impressive
than would because they are capable of doing some amazing stuff.
And if you stop and think about it, your bone
is capable of withstanding tremendous amounts of pressure and force.
But at the same time, you can use that bone
to break another bone, which is kind of paradoxical, you know. Yeah,
(10:30):
but it's pretty neat. So yeah, there's there's if you
look at bone, there's a lot of stress you can
put it on before it's going to break. Yeah, so,
uh a cubic inch of bone. And they point out
this article in principle, I'm sure there are, you know,
people like Samuel Jackson an Unbreakable Mr Glass, Sure he
(10:53):
had a physical condition. I think they're doing another movie
of of him and the guy from uh, what was
the most recent one that Split? Split. Yeah, they're doing
like basically a sequel to Split featuring Mr Glass and
Bruce Willis. It's all, oh, wow, that's gonna be good.
It looks pretty good to me so far. I went
(11:15):
back and rewatched Unbreakable, and I was like, this is
much better than I thought it was the first time.
It's a good movie. I totally agree. I think people
expected well, I think it it got it to do
at the time, but it was a movie about the
beginnings of a It was just an ultralong origin story, right,
which you didn't realize until about two thirds of the
(11:36):
way through, you know, and then you really got it
at the end. But yeah, I think everybody was expecting,
give me another sixth sense, baby, kind of need that jolt,
and uh, he just never delivered like he did on
the sixth sense. So he's kind of cursed by it,
which is why you have to go back years later
and see it again. You're like, oh, now that I'm
out of like the six cents junkiness, I I can
(11:56):
appreciate Unbreakable and the Village too. I saw that in
le two and I'm like, this is better than I
thought it was. Yeah. That was Manky's pick on movie Crush.
Oh that's right, yeah, yeah, that was yes, totally kind
of on the nose for Airmankey. Yeah. Um, all right,
So Mr glass aside, though, in principle, a bone can
bear a load of nineteen thousand pounds or more, and
(12:21):
that makes it as your correct article said four times
as strong as concrete, whereas R said forty times. Yeah,
who cares, which is not correct. Right, So this this
is I think a Live science article I found this in.
But if you balanced five American pickup trucks, says standard
(12:41):
pickup truck. So I'm just gonna go with a one fifty. Yeah.
Well I wasn't gonna say for it. I was just
you know, if you were in the know, I was
just going to leave it at that. But if you
balance five Ford f one fifties nose to tail um
on top of your armbone, theoretically it should be able
(13:04):
to hold that up. You would wish that you were dead,
but your armbone would just be like, oh god, this
I'm not gonna break, and it might not break. But
again the point is this. That is the amount of
actual weight, but weight can actually be combined in other
ways and delivered an other way. So if you delivered
(13:25):
far far less than that with um a lot more
velocity um, your your bone would just snap right in two.
So there's a lot of variables they're including not just
how that amount of weight is delivered in what what
kind of force, but also your age, your health. There's
a lot of stuff, but like you said, generally speaking,
(13:48):
your bone, a cubic inch of bone could bear nine
pounds or about eight thousand, six hundreds of weight. Yeah.
And although this is gets away from board breaking, it
was in the article sent and I thought it was
super interesting. When it comes to getting in a fistfight
or boxing. When someone gets knocked out by a punch,
(14:08):
it's not necessarily because they get hit so hard in
the head. It's that there if you hit someone in
the cheek, you know, right there, and the and the
kisser and the jaw, it's the head spin that does it.
So if your head spins around, uh from zero to
forty three RPMs in a second, your your head stresses
(14:33):
out and the brain shuts down as a protection. Yeah,
I had no idea of getting knocked out chance if
it's up to RPMs. So that's why boxers built up
their neck muscles so their head doesn't snap to the
side as much. Yeah, totally had no idea about any
(14:53):
of that, or getting hit in the stomach, Like when
the wind is knocked out of you, that's a spasm
of your diaphragm right right. And the reason why you
can make somebody's head spin like that, or make or
cause somebody's diaphragm to spas them is because you're concentrating
a tremendous amount of force in a fairly small area.
Like if you look at the front if you make
(15:15):
a fist and then look at the front of your
fingers where the fist makes contact with whatever that's that's
actually a relatively small area that you're putting a tremendous
amount of mass and velocity behind. And you combine those two,
you multiply those two, and you have force. And humans
can can concentrate a pretty pretty significant amount of force.
(15:37):
This Life Science article found that a professional boxer could
generate about five thousand Newton's of force, and a Newton,
by the way, is the amount of force it takes
to move one kilogram one meter, which makes me want
to go move a kilogram a meter so bad just
to be like, I just used a Newton. I just
(15:58):
exerted a Newton right there? You know? Is that just
me that you don't want to do that too? So um.
A boxer can generate about five thousand Newton's of force
with a punch, which is about half of a ton
of um of force exerted on the Earth's surface. Okay,
(16:21):
half a ton of force in your little your little
fist right there. And because four sequels mass times velocity,
if you can generate more um velocity and you and
you can use more mass, you can generate more force.
And we'll talk more about that later on with the physics.
(16:41):
But that's just a little teaser. Yeah, And this is
also the point, and I've pointed this out before, I
believe where I would like to say that I am
forty seven years old and I have never punched or
hit anyone in my life. Nor been punched or hit.
That's great, man, never been in a fight. I kind
of feel like I should get in a fight. I
(17:01):
don't think so. I think you should feel the opposite
of that. You should be proud of it. Yeah, just
be like, I've never been in a fight. I'm gonna
die having never been in a fist fight. You definitely
don't need to. Don't listen to fight Club. It was
made up, by the way. All right, should we take
a break, Yeah, all right, We'll take a break and
we'll talk more about board board breaking right after this,
(17:40):
all right, Chuck so um when you actually break aboard,
we can tell you how to do that. But again
I want to preface it with like, just don't don't
go do this, don't listen to us and do this. Like,
if you want to do this, go check out martial arts,
go to your nearest O Joe and see what's going down.
That's right, But just for the sake of sharing information,
(18:04):
that's what we're doing here. Okay. Yes, So if you
if you watch somebody break aboard, you're gonna see that
there's actually like a fairly uniform shape to them. They're
usually about a foot wide, they're usually kind of squarish,
and there's something like about three quarters of an inch thick.
(18:27):
And again, like I said, traditionally, um, the wood is
supposed to be cedar, but I think these days most people,
uh say pine. They use pine because it's a soft
wood and it breaks easier than a hardwood like oak
or something like that. Yeah, And they also suggest to
not have like a big not right in the center
of this board or hopefully anywhere on the board, but
(18:49):
definitely not where you're punching, because the center is where
you want to be punching. And this is usually either
held by somebody or you see them set up sometimes
with on on stands and stuff being held. Yeah, if
you watch Karate Kid too, when daniels Son breaks through
those six sheets of ice, I don't remember that at all.
(19:11):
They have It was like in a bar. He took
a bet Actually, Mr Miyagi kind of forced him to
take the bet um because he was being betted against
by Mr Miyagi's rivals. Nephew, Okay, he's got to see it,
but he got a good memory of Karate Kid too.
I just watched it like an hour ago, okay, but yeah,
(19:33):
they had like a stand that they put these sheets
of ice in. It was pretty awesome, pretty cool little gizmo.
I don't think there's any reason to make it unless
you do kind of have a bar where people break
ice and stuff. But it's uh, I just thought it
was pretty cool. But for the most part, you see
somebody just standing there holding it like it's like a
punching target or something. Yeah, and there's I mean, it
(19:54):
kind of depends, that's if you're punching straight through with
your knuckles. You've also seen things stacked like spread between
two bricks, a bunch of wood stacked and you can
use a few techniques here at the hammer fist, which
is like if you were just pounding on a you know,
on a table with your with your hand like hulk smash, yeah,
hulk smash or what's known as palm heel. And that's
(20:17):
when you yeah, with with your palm. Yeah. If I
saw somebody break a board like that, I would be
truly impressed that I have not seen. Have you seen
somebody break a board in real life? No? Not not
in person? No I haven't either. Uh. And then the
old knife hand, which is the classic karate chop. The
(20:39):
reason why you want to hit the center of the
board is myriad number one. That's where the least amount
of strength is in the board. It's not around the edges,
it's more in the center. And depending on how you're hitting,
let's let's just go with the good old fashioned karate chop.
What's that one called the knife hand? Yeah, and when
(20:59):
you can all so do this these these uh with
kicks you can which to me it just seems terribly scary.
I don't know about you, but like I don't want
anything to happen to my ankle or my heel or
my achilles heel. Or any my toes. Nothing like that.
Like the the punching breaking with your hands or fists,
(21:20):
that's that's cool enough, But like your foot, I'd be
very It would take a tremendous amount of training for
me to get to that point. All right. So we're
going with the standard karate chop, right, And when you're
doing the standardkarate chop, so the board is going to
be flat relative to the earth, and you are going
to bring your fist down or your your karate chop
(21:42):
down going with the grain, you will have a tremendously
difficult time breaking the board against the grain. You want
to go bring the line of your hand parallel with
the grain. Yeah, I didn't fully get that, Okay. So
if you have a flat board in front of you,
you're you're on your knees and you're like about to
chop it, and you hold your hold your fist up
(22:05):
like that, or hold your karate chop up like this
right in front of you, and you start to bring
it down. The grain of the wood should be going
the same direction as your hand. But what I mean
that makes sense if your hand is in karate chop
mode because there's a clear line. But what about when
it's a fist. I don't know. Maybe it matters less
(22:27):
because it's a fist. I could see it mattering more
because there's so much less surface area that's making contact
with the karate chop than like with the whole fist.
So I would guess the grain definitely would matter more
with that, al Right, But regardless supposedly they say going
with the grain is easier, Yeah, it's just easier in life.
That's a life note. Go with the grain, go with
(22:49):
the flow. Actually I don't necessarily I don't necessarily espouse that, agreed. Okay. So, um,
one of the other things you're gonna learn is um focus.
And you kind of touched on this earlier, but you
were kind of talking about how you you want to
stop You like, if you if you go to hit
a board or a piece of wood or a piece
(23:11):
of concrete or something like that, your brain's gonna scream
stop dummy. Yeah, So how do you get over that
when you go into training where you're trained to break boards? Well,
I mean you you focus. You try to focus as
if the the board that you were breaking as several
inches behind the actual board. To participitate or encourage that
(23:34):
follow through. But they also make a very good point
about breathing. And if you saw Karate Kid, what does
he say with all everything, remember, breathe then breathe out. Well,
they actually do that to prepare for the ice breaking. Yeah,
so it's breathing is very important and then you know
if you hear that, yeah, I mean that's just not
for showboating and flair. Uh, the same way as a
(23:57):
tennis player might grunt when they hit, like Steffi Graph, No,
she had, she had one of the best. Yea or no,
who's sell Us? Didn't she have a really good grunt?
I thought it was Steffi graph I don't remember. I
definitely remember sell Us had a Yeah. Is that your impression? Yeah?
That was my Monica sell Us. Okay man. Remember she
(24:19):
got stabbed on the court. Wasn't that crazy? No, I
don't remember that at all. Yeah, he had. She had.
She was attacked and stabbed a tennis match by a
crazed fan. Yeah, and it really derailed her career, I
would imagine. So, I mean, like if you if you're
not safe on like the tennis court doing your thing,
it takes a lot of concentration to play tennis. You
(24:41):
don't want to think about what's like coming up behind you,
you know, while you're hitting a return. Good God, And
I think most people take up tennis because you have
a near chance of not being stabbed. Yes, it is
a pretty stabbed free pursuit. Uh So, anyway, where were
we were talking about how um breathing in the kia
(25:05):
That is all to do with the focus, like bringing
that whole routine together with the breaths and the exclamation
as you punch supposedly a few inches behind where the
board is. Yeah, and I actually looked that up where
he came from or what the point is, and there's
that's supposedly a kind of an embellishment or a flourish
(25:27):
or on the actual breathing. You don't actually have to
make a sound or say a word or say something
that sounds that sounds like a word that you you're
actually expelling breath very quickly. And the reason why you're
doing this because you're meant to be focusing on your
breath so that when you actually punch or bring your
hand down or kick or whatever, what your what your
(25:50):
brain is pretending it's doing is breathing, and your your
hand or your foot motion is just kind of a byproduct,
and it distracts you from worrying or thinking about pulling
your punch, because there's a real problem with pulling your punch.
If you stop, if you if you pull your punch,
if you try to ease off on the speed right
(26:12):
before you hit, you're still gonna hit. But rather than
driving through the board or the concrete or whatever it
is you're the force of that is actually going to
bounce off the board, won't break, and it will reverberate
through the board and then back up into your hand,
and it's going to hurt terribly impossibly even break one
(26:33):
of your bones. So that natural instinct to pull up
is what ends up causing the injury. Ironically, yes, so
your brain is trying to make itself safe, but your
brain hasn't really thought things through. But if you follow through,
like you said, if you focus on hitting a place
that's actually on the other side, beyond the board, you're
you're more likely to keep going through to follow through.
(26:55):
And another reason why this is a good idea is
because I think somebody, some physicists figured out that the
peak of a blow or a strike or something like
that occurs at about a mark of the arc or
of the downward motion or of the motion. Right, So
(27:17):
it's not like when you punch through or something that's
when you hit. It's actually happening right before possibly you
hit the board. So if you're if your brain is
saying don't punch that it's gonna hurt, and you already
just naturally aren't delivering of the blow right then anyway,
you're really gonna have your hand bounce off and it's
(27:38):
going to be a problem. Should we take another break?
Hey man? Why not? All right, we'll talk a little
bit more about that physics, uh in a in a
very special astronaut right after this. Alright, Chuck, we're back,
(28:09):
and I think I speak for all of the world,
and I say, what do astronauts have to do with this?
So this was pretty interesting to me. And apparently in
the seventies a couple of physicists uh dudes that were
also martial artists I decided to sort of look into
the physics of board breaking and do that research. In
(28:30):
what they came up with was speed is the is
the overriding factor when it comes to board breaking, right,
Because you mentioned earlier, you know, the more you increase
that velocity or that force, or the more you increase
the velocity, the more you're going to increase the force. Right,
And you can increase your velocity just by doing something
as simple as pulling your fists back further before you
(28:54):
bring it down, give you more room, more more of
a head start, or something like that. Yeah, and this
is aim. And like it's the same with anything, whether
you're cutting a chopping a tree, or hitting a baseball.
You do you hear about bat speed and baseball. You know,
you want your punch to be as fast as possible,
not just to catch your opponent off guard, but because
(29:14):
you generate more force in the end, right, And you
can also recruit more mass from different parts of your body.
And it's you can recruit mass more easily with a
kick than with a punch, which is why you generate
more Newton's of force with a kick them with a punch,
because you have more muscle mass that you can draw
(29:35):
from to direct out through your foot in a kick. Yeah,
and you always to hear about with kicks, punches, golf swings,
baseball bats. It's like they say, it's in in the hips. Yeah,
that's what Actually, that's what um Daniel Son said. Really,
there's a real lesson here in Hollywood history. Uh So apparently,
(30:00):
if you are a typical beginner in kata te, you
can get up to about twenty per second with with
your hand speed, which uh, in terms of math or maths,
is enough to break a one inch pine board. Yeah,
And I looked it up at I saw that something
about like Newton's to break a pine board. Okay, so
(30:25):
good and from what I saw, and basically any beginner
can walk up after about five ten minutes of instruction
and break through a single pine board typically if they
do it right right. So, if you're out there saying
Chuck still hasn't talked about the special astronaut one of
these physicists in the seventies, his name was Ronald Ron
McNair and he was also an astronaut, and he was
(30:48):
also played the saxomaphone, and he was all set to
record the very first recorded piece of music in space
in history when he boarded the A Shuttle Challenger and
as a black belt and saxomaphone player, and sadly we
all know how that ended. So he was the physicist
(31:10):
who did this research on board breaking as it turns out.
Have you have you ever been to Kennedy Space Center,
Which one's Kennedy, the one on Cape Canaveral. Yeah, yeah,
I think so they have is they have a museum there, um,
just fantastic museum. And in part of it they have
like personal effects of some of the uh of all
(31:32):
of actually the Challenger and the Columbia astronauts who were lost,
and one of them is Ronald McNair's like karate uniform. Interesting. Yeah,
it's pretty it's really amazing to see the way they
have this kind of memorial set up. It's it's it'll
bring it tear to your eye. Yeah. I mean if
I went it was before that even happened, I would
have been very young. Oh yeah yeah. And I think
(31:54):
that the memorials even fairly newish. So yeah, yeah, it's
definitely worth a visits for for just that even but
the whole the whole museum is really great. Yeah. We
should do an episode about the space shuttle disaster at
some point. I think you're right. It would be a good,
a good somber one because we did one on the
I S S, so maybe we could do one on
space shuttles in general. Yeah, all right. Uh so Ron McNair,
(32:17):
long story short, he was so good he could get
his karate chop up to forty six ft per second,
which equates to about twenty eight hundred Newton's of force,
which is about a quarter ton. Yeah that's a lot. Yeah,
because they say it takes nineteen hundred tons I'm sorry
Newton's to break a one and a half inch concrete slab,
(32:38):
and he he could put forth Newton's right. So there
you have it. It's really just physics. So it's like
at this point Chuck in in research where I was like, okay,
wait a minute, it's just physics. Is this just like
like um circus stuff? Is this the circus arts? Really? Is?
It's just fake? And did Chuck dupe me somehow weird
(33:00):
into doing another circus article? So the the the thing
is is, I know it's not like there are physics involved,
and you have to know what you're doing, and there's
definitely a wrong way, and you can injure yourself, especially
if you pull your punch. The more boards there are,
the easier it would be to hurt yourself, depending on
how they're stacked. But it would be wrong to say
(33:24):
that it is that physics does not very much aid
in this. It's not a trick. It's not a trick,
and it is very well thought through. And the more
boards you add, or the different materials you add, obviously
the more skill you're demonstrating. But the reason why physics
plays a part is things like the grain, Like breaking
(33:46):
along the grain. That means that the break is going
to occur along the grain. It's gonna be a lot
easier for that break to propagate. Um things like if
you look at a board. The reason why you're using
something like pine rather than a hard would it's not
because hardwoods are like harder, they're more resilient. The pine
is going to be more brittle. So when you hit something,
(34:07):
you're creating a resonance in it. And I think this
is in the Bridges episode where if you get something
into its natural resonance and the natural resonance is overwhelmed,
it will break apart. That's what you're doing when you
break a border, where you break concrete or something like that,
you're transferring force from your body into this this inanimate object,
(34:30):
and you're in doing so, you're creating a resonance in
it that is hopefully enough to overcome the objects natural
resonance and break it apart. And it's you know, when
you say it like that, it seems like a slow process,
but this happens very quickly. With oak or something like that.
It's it's much more resilient, it's much more elastic, and
so it's going to resonate more than break it's compared
(34:54):
to say like pine. So there's another example of how
physics um comes in. And then also if you look
at things like five stacked boards that somebody's punching through,
they're not five stacked boards one right on top of
each other. Even the most battle hardened sense a in
the universe would think two or three times before trying
(35:18):
that and would probably be like, I'm not going to
do that today. You'd be a moron to do that
because most people would not be able to break through that.
But if you have space between them, that changes everything. Yes,
So is that true? Is it is it the boards
that are breaking the other boards? Yes? And are you
really just breaking that first boarder? Is it the first few? No?
(35:39):
Because if you think about it, if you stop right,
if like you if you're the place where you're going
to break through stops like say, right before the third board,
you're you're going to break your hand on that third board.
So it does take discipline and focus and thought to
where you're punching beyond that fifth board. Right, Um, but yeah,
(36:00):
when you break through that first one, you're punching through
to the next one and punching through the next one.
So as each board gives way, it's helping break the
next one. But really it's getting out of the way
and you're just punching through another board, and then that
one gets out of the way, and there's another one
you're punching through. But it's all in just one smooth
motion as you punch beyond that say, fifth board. But
(36:21):
if they're all stacked up right next to each other,
you're not punching through five five boards. You're punching through
one board five boards thick, and then that does not
have that same effect because you're trying to punch the
whole thing all at once and your hands is going
to turn to mush. So in theory, uh, you would
only be able to punch through as many boards as
your arm punch length. Yes, right, Well, so here's the deal.
(36:48):
Is board breaking just for show? Is that an act?
Is there any merit to it whatsoever? And the answer
is sort of back and forth depending on who you
talk to. I think there are some martial arts purists, Well,
it depends. There's probably purists on both sides that say
this is an ancient tradition that we still like to practice. Uh.
(37:10):
It's good for obviously recruiting people to your dojo if
you are a master board breaker in your town, But
then other people say, no, you know it's it is
only for show. Bruce leeve And said, supposedly boards don't
hit back, Like what you should be doing is training
and focusing on things and not sort of like a
(37:31):
side show trick, even though it's not a trick trick. Uh.
And then it doesn't do anything to further martial arts.
It's just sort of a thing to get attention. And
I liked how this article kind of put it. It It
was saying, like you actually teach kids that they can
get praised for doing unimportant things like breaking through some boards,
where really they should be being praised or being trained
(37:53):
to do stuff that's actually useful, right, Like it it's
it's definitely not a true gauge of your progress as
a martial artist. No, But like I was reading about
the ninety six Tokyo Karate Open, I think, and it
um if you wanted to progress to the next round,
you had to fight, and then you had to break
(38:14):
some boards and you had to break like X number
of boards and then you can move on the next round,
fight break some more boards. So it's not like there's
it's just totally useless in the martial arts world. And
the whole reason it's there is strictly to attract new students.
Although I think it really works for that, like it
does have practical use, But outside of the martial arts
(38:35):
like competition world, does it I think is the larger point. Yeah,
I'd like to hear from martial artists and get a
true insider's take on what they think about it. Yeah,
same here. Would you ever take any martial arts? I
took taekwondo as a youngster, and I was like, wait
a minute, wait a minute, We're just like kicking the air.
I want to like, what are we doing here? And
(38:57):
it became very clear that there was a long path
I had to me to wherever I wanted to be,
and I was like, I'm not doing this. I'm gonna
go home and eat some twigs. Peanut butter or caramel
peanut butter. I eat caramel if it was around, but
peanut butter is always my favorite. Yeah. Did they still
make those peanut butter twigs? Yes, they do so good.
(39:17):
I think that's it. Huh. Yeah. I looked up some
records just quickly here, like world records, to see what
was out there, and don't bother unless you have hours
to sort through this, because there are literally dozens and
dozens and dozens of variations of world records. Apparently you
can just make anything up, and if you're the first
(39:39):
person to do that, like there are records like a
couple that punched through this much glass and this much time,
or a man who who punched through a lot of
them are time based, like this many pieces of glass
while humming the theme from mash uh like, it seems
(39:59):
like can just make anything up and and get I mean,
there's glass breaking ice boards, there's kicks, there's head stuff,
hand stuff, concrete. It's just all over the place. And
I finally gave up when I saw a record for
a guy breaking boards in free fall. So he skydived
(40:19):
and was surrounded by skydivers that would float up to
him and hold boards in front of his face. It
was very intimidating, looking like just shoving these boards in
his face while he's floating, and he would gather himself
up enough to punch through the board. And that's when
I was like, I'm out. I think I'm done. That
guy's the world record holder for awesome. That's pretty great.
(40:41):
I don't even think about that. I want to combine
my passion for skydiving with my passion for karate. Yeah,
it was pretty dumb. Last thing I had was there's
a legend that if you are in the UFC, the
Ultimate Fighting Championship or whatever, and there's a rule against
downward elbow strikes because it's it's thought that they're possibly lethal,
(41:06):
so they're an illegal move and they The legend is
is that the reason is because the UFC commissioner was
at a board breaking competition and saw somebody break a
bunch of like boards or concrete with their elbow and
did not realize that there's a lot of physics involved
and went back and like immediately made this rule no
(41:27):
downward elbow strikes. It's obviously you can kill a man
like that because I saw some dude breaks and boards
with his elbow. Isn't that interesting? Yeah, I don't watch
uh you need that stuff, So I don't know. It's
just so brutal. Man. Yeah, I can watch boxing all
day long, but ultimate fighting it's, oh my god, it's brutal.
I used to love boxing growing up. It's it holds up. Yeah.
(41:50):
Just I think when when the heavyweight division sort of
got less interesting post Tyson. Oh yeah, yeah, I just
I was into a girl going up with like the
legends like Marvin Hagler and Roberto Duran and Sugarade Leonard
and Tyson and Spinks and Homes. It just ali. Of
course it was. It was one of the premier sports.
(42:11):
And it's just I don't know. When you when I'm
trying to figure out which clich Ko brother is who,
I'm just kind of done. So yeah, I don't know
anything about it. I guess post Tyson, now that I
think about, I don't know anybody's name post Tyson. To
tell you the truth, as far as heavyweights are concerned,
there's a bunch of clitch cos that's all. Okay, Well
(42:33):
that explain to it. Clitch cos Well, if you want
to know more about board breaking, go get into martial arts.
I strongly recommend it, even though I didn't. Don't make
the same mistake I did. Ah, And since I said
that it's time for listener mail, alright, I'm gonna call
this pin setters. We heard from quite a few people
(42:53):
who were pin setters or had relatives that were pin setters,
and this one I thought was very sweet. Just enjoy
jobs of bygone eras guys. And I remembered that my
dad once worked as a pin setter and his ute.
I called him and talked to him about his experiences
after your show, and here a few highlights the nine
sixty and he was twelve. This is Cleveland, Ohio, and
(43:16):
he remembered that this particular bowling alley was the last one,
I guess in Cleveland to convert to automatic setting. He
was paid two cents of frame or twenty cents per game. Uh.
Bowlers would slide nickels, dimes, and quarters down the lane
as a tip. Oh that's pretty cool. Yeah, And you
had to be quick to snatch up your tip because
(43:36):
sometimes they would try to snipe you with a ball.
I guess awful setters were responsible for three to four
lanes at a time, and he worked on a slightly
elevated catwalk. My dad was hit several times with pins
and he said it was just part of the job,
and the bowlers made him mad. He would offset one
of the rear pins to decrease the chance of a
strike for him sticking into the man. This is from
(44:00):
Ray Hovorka, and he says, thanks a lot. My dad
is seventy now and always lights up when he gets
a chance to regale in his youth. So thank you
Ray Hovorka and Mr Hovorka for your work as a
pin setter. Captain Doc Havorca Esquire. That's raised dad's name. Now, Okay,
So if you want to tell us some cool story
(44:23):
your dad told you, we love those. You can get
in touch with us through social media. Just go to
our website Stuff you Should Know dot com uh and
you can also send us an email. Just send it
off to Stuff podcast How Stuff Works dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
(44:44):
how Stuff Works to
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