How Board Breaking Works

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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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,

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 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, 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,

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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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.

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 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, 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.

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 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, 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, 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. 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 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.

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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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

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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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?

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, 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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.

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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 how Stuff Works to