Stuff You Should Know - How Board Breaking Works

Episode Date: August 14, 2018

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.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.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. Oh, wait, I mean, it's all about board breaking. That's right. Board breaking, I gotta keep them straight. Do you wanna explain what you just said? Sure. So, you know, when we pick our topics,

one of us will send a topic, the other one will send a different topic, 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. And I wanna preface this by saying, we have more than 1,000 episodes that we've done, okay?

Just bear that in mind, everybody. More than. I sent you How Mars Works was my pick for this week. And 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, we've already done How Mars Works.

Hours of Mars research, just totally wasted. Down the drain. I know so much about Mars right now that no one's ever gonna hear it. I'm gonna take it to my grave. 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 Karate before. Who knows, Chuck, who has any idea? Well, Jill Hurley knows. Yes, Jill Hurley, our minister of stats, usually keeps track of this stuff. She does.

We should just start emailing her every time we have an idea instead of looking at the spreadsheet that she sends us. Exactly. Like a couple of dopes. Yes, no, but board breaking, I'm 100% sure we did not do before. No, and we might as well go ahead

and do a couple of things. First of all, COA and say, do not try to break boards or anything with your hands and feet unless you are 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 everything I can find, it's a really great thing to get into.

Martial arts? Yeah, it is. It teaches you focus and discipline and training and strength and self-confidence and actually the injury rate is really, really low, way lower than you would think. So it's actually a pretty good sport to get into. Yeah, and the other thing to point out early on

is 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 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, that'd be cool. A 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 not hard. And we'll find out why it's not hard later on

because we're gonna 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 may be 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.

Yes. Is that true? Yeah, yeah, so that was something that I came across is so board breaking, at least in Japan, is called Temesawari. Yeah. And there's fake Temesawari, which is probably 99% of the Temesawari out there. Oh, wow.

And then there's actual real Temesawari, which you have to be basically insane to try, even as like a black belt karate person. But what do you mean by fake? Instead of fake, we'll call it physics assisted. Okay. Whereas with like that 1% of Temesawari, it is what it appears to be.

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, cause I thought I'd never heard that story about the legend of the origins of pinchecks a lot. Take us to Storyville, Chuck. So there's an island called Baweon in ancient Indonesia.

And this is mainly legend, but who knows? It might have gone down like this. But supposedly there was a lady there named Rama Sukkana, who was washing her clothes 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 abuse you because my dinner's not on the table. And she was like, oh, no, no, no. I now know the way of the monkey.

And she fought him back and it worked. And it kept working. He kept coming at her and she kept just going, ka-ba, shabat, foot, and ooh, ah. Right. And she kept putting him on his butt so much so that he said, master, train 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 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, pentjak salat. Yeah, which I thought that was very, very odd that this was included in this article because I looked up pentjak salat. And it looked like it was very much into fighting with knives and spears, way more than breaking boards or 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 using like those kind of like approaches, but rather than with your empty hand, you're using knives. So I don't know why that was included. Instead karate is much more associated with board breaking. Again, there's a Japanese word for board breaking,

tamishawari. Yeah, and did you know that cobra kai actually means knife-wielding cobra? Does it really? No. Well, I mean, it could be like cobra knife and you could just interpret it as knife-wielding cobra rather than a knife made out of a cobra.

Could you imagine anything more terrifying than a cobra holding a knife? No, maybe a deranged karate monkey with a cobra-wielding and knife. Yeah, or an alligator with an assault rifle. Yeah, that's pretty scary. That's pretty scary. So karate is meant to be done with open-handed,

actually means open hand. Empty hand, right? Yeah, one of the two. And the origins of karate apparently came from when the peasantry was stripped of their weapons in the 16th and 17th century because the Japanese government, feudal government said, we're worried you guys 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 is karate. And again, part of karate over the years, I'm not exactly sure where tamishawari originated or when I should say,

but over the years, the idea of breaking boards is a demonstration of skill and training and focus and strength has developed to where now, to me, it's basically synonymous with martial arts. Pya, breaking some boards. 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, it's been around for a little while and there are some customary and traditional things

with the board, like for example, you're supposed to use cedar, specific type of cedar to break. No, interesting. 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 Tamishawari board breaking. Well, what we do know that there is a human instinct to not punch something 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 was 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 bone and your hand and your foot and your leg are actually way more impressive than wood 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, I didn't think about that. It's pretty neat. So yeah, if you look at bone, there's a lot of stress you can put it on before it's going to break. Yeah, so a cubic inch of bone, and they point out in this article in principle,

I'm sure there are people like Samuel Jackson and Unbreakable, Mr. Glass. Sure. He had a physical condition. I think they're doing another movie of him and the guy from, what was the most recent one? Yeah, Split. Split, yeah, they're doing basically a sequel

to Split featuring Mr. Glass. And Bruce Willis, it's all three of them. Oh, wow, that's gonna be good. 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 got it to do at the time, but it was a movie about the beginnings of a, it was just an ultra long 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 six cents, baby. Come on, I need that jolt. And he just never delivered like he did on the six cents. So he was 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 can appreciate Unbreakable. And the Village too, I saw that recently too. And I'm like, this is better than I thought it was. Yeah, that was Manki's pick on Movie Crush. Oh, that's right, yeah. Yeah, that was totally kind of on the nose. For Air and Manki. Yeah, yeah.

All right, so Mr. Glass aside though, in principle, a bone can bear a load of 19,000 pounds or more. And that makes it, as your correct article said, four times as strong as concrete, whereas ours said 40 times. Yeah, who cares? Which is not correct. Right, so this is I think a live science article

I found this in, but if you balanced five American pickup pickup trucks, it's a standard pickup truck. So I'm just going to go with a 150. Okay, four to 150. Yeah, well, I wasn't going to say Ford. Sure, it went up. 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-150s nose to tail on top of your arm bone, theoretically, it should be able to hold that up. You would wish that you were dead, but your arm bone would just be like, oh, God, this, I'm not going to 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 in other ways. So if you delivered far, far less than that with a lot more velocity, yeah, your bone would just snap right in two. So there's a lot of variables there, including not just how that amount of weight

is delivered and 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 19,000 pounds or about 8,626 kilograms of weight. Yeah, and although this gets away from board breaking, it was in the article you sent,

and I thought it was super interesting when it comes to getting in a fist fight 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 if you hit someone in the cheek, right there in the kisser in the jaw, it's the head spin that does it. So if your head spins around from zero to 43,000 RPMs

in a second, your head stresses out and the brain shuts down as a protection. Yeah, I had no idea. So 25% of getting knocked out, 25% chance, if it's up to 43,000 RPMs. So that's why boxers build 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 cause somebody's diaphragm to spasm 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 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 concentrate a pretty significant amount of force. This live science article found that a professional boxer could generate about 5,000 Newtons 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 a boxer can generate about 5,000 Newtons of force with a punch, which is about half of a ton of force exerted on the earth's surface. Okay? Half a ton of force in your little fist right there. And because force equals mass times velocity,

if you can generate more velocity 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 47 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. Yeah, just keep it going. You should be proud of that walk around.

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 breaking right after this. No matter what. No matter what. No matter what, it's not so bad. I can't get it right. They're freaking that out. And oh well, we have time tonight. It's not like we can get it right without them.

No matter what, it won't be so bad. But come on, that's not gonna be great. It has to have our own charms. What's зав poorest with the box. What's sorry, come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews,

co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road.

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each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And it's like it's a show up on Chuck. All right, Chuck. So when you actually break a board, we can tell you how to do that. But again, I want to preface it with,

like just 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 dojo 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 watch somebody break a board, you're going to 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 the wood

is supposed to be cedar, but I think these days, most people say pine. They use pine because it's a softwood and it breaks easier than a hardwood like oak or something like that. Yeah. And they also suggest to not have like a big knot 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 stands and stuff being held. Yeah. If you watch Karate Kid II when Daniel's 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. Oh yeah. Actually, Mr. Miyagi kind of forced him to take the bet because he was being bedded against by Mr. Miyagi's rival's nephew. Okay.

He's got to see it. Maybe he got a good memory of Karate Kid II. Oh, I just watched it like an hour ago. Okay. But 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 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, the hammer fist, which is like if you were just pounding on it, you know, on a table with your hand. Like Hulk smash.

Yeah, Hulk smash. Or what's known as palm heel. And that's when you, yeah, with your palm. Yeah. If I saw somebody break a board like that, I would be truly impressed. I've seen that. I have not seen, have you seen somebody break a board in real life?

No, not in person. No, I haven't either. 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 just go with the good old fashioned karate chop. What's that one called, the knife hand? Yeah. And you can also do these 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 punching or breaking with your hands or fists, 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. Yeah. All right. So we're going with the standard karate chop. Right. And when you're doing the standard karate chop,

so the board's going to be flat relative to the earth. And you are going to bring your fist down or 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 on your knees and you're like about to chop it. And you 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, cause 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. Okay. 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. All 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. Yeah, agreed. Okay, so one of the other things you're going to learn is focus, Chuck. And you kind of touched on this earlier, but you're kind of talking about how you want to stop. Like if you go to hit a board or a piece of wood

or a piece of concrete or something like that, your brain's going to 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 focus, you try to focus as if the board that you're breaking

is several inches behind the actual board to precipitate 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 everything? Remember, breathe and 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 the, yeah, I mean, that's just not for showboating and flair, the same way a tennis player might grunt when they hit. It's like Steffi Graf. Oh, she had one of the best. Yeah. Or no, who was Celis? Didn't she have the really good grunt?

I thought it was Steffi Graf. I don't remember. I definitely remember Celis had a, yeah. Is that your impression? Yeah, that was my Monica Celis. Oh, okay. Man, remember she got stabbed on the court when that crazy?

No, I don't remember that at all. Yeah, she was attacked and stabbed Oh my God. during a tennis match. By a crazed fan? Yeah, and it really derailed her career. I would imagine so. I mean, like, if you're not safe on like the tennis court

doing your thing, I mean, 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 100% chance of not being stabbed. Yes, it is a pretty stab-free pursuit, yeah.

So anyway, where were we? We were talking about how. Oh, breathing and 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 supposedly a kind of an embellishment or a flourish on the actual breathing. You don't actually have to make a sound or say a word or say something that sounds like a word that you're actually expelling breath very quickly. And the reason why you're doing that is 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 brain is pretending it's doing is breathing and your hand or your foot motion is just kind of a byproduct and it distracts you from worrying or thinking about pulling your punch. Right. Because there's a real problem with pulling your punch.

If you stop, 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, 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

and possibly even break one of your bones. Yeah, 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 more likely to keep going through to follow through. And another reason why this is a good idea is because I think some physicists figured out that the peak of a blow or a strike or something like that occurs at about 80%, at the 80% 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 100%. It's actually happening right before possibly you hit the board. So if your brain is saying, don't punch, that's gonna hurt and you already just naturally aren't delivering 100% 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 in a very special astronaut, right after this. ["Paydude the 90s"] On the podcast, Paydude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in

as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen.

So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And it's like it got you up in shock. All right, 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 70s, a couple of physicist dudes that were also martial artists decided to sort of look into the physics of board breaking and do that research. And what they came up with was speed is the overriding factor when it comes to board breaking. Because you mentioned earlier, 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 fist back further before you bring it down. Giving it more room, more of a head start or something like that.

Yeah, and it's the same with anything, whether you're chopping a tree or hitting a baseball, you hear about bat speed and baseball. 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 you can recruit mass more easily with a kick than with a punch, which is why you generate more newtons of force with a kick than 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 do hear about with kicks, punches, golf swings, baseball bats.

It's like they say it's in the hips. Yeah, that's what actually, that's what Daniel Sun said. Oh, really? Yeah. There's a real lesson here in Hollywood history. So apparently, if you were a typical beginner in karate, you can get up to about 20 feet per second with your hand speed, which in terms of math or maths,

is enough to break a one inch pine board. Yeah, and I looked it up. I saw that something about like 1,100 newtons to break a pine board. OK. So good. And from what I saw, basically any beginner can walk up after about five, 10 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 70s, his name was Ronald Ron McNair, and he was also an astronaut. And he also played the saxophone.

And he was all set to record the very first recorded piece of music in space and history when he boarded the Space Shuttle Challenger and as a black belt and saxophone player. And sadly, we all know how that ended. Yeah. So he was the physicist who did this research on board breaking, as it turns out.

Have you ever been to Kennedy Space Center? Which one's Kennedy? The one on Cape Canaveral. Yeah, yeah, I think so. They have a museum there, just fantastic museum. And in part of it, they have like personal effects of some of the, 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 a 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 the memorial's even fairly newish. So yeah, it's definitely worth a visit for just that even, but 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'd be a good, a good somber one. Because we did one on the ISS.

So maybe we could do one on Space Shuttles in general. Yeah. All right. So, Ron McNair, long story short, he was so good, he could get his karate chop up to 46 feet per second, which equates to about 2,800 Newtons of force. Which is about a quarter ton. Yeah, that's a lot.

Yeah. Because they say it takes 1,900 tons, I'm sorry, 1,900 Newtons to break a one and a half inch concrete slab. And he could put forth 2,800 Newtons. Right. So there you have it. It's really just physics. So it's like, at this point, Chuck, in research where I was

like, OK, wait a minute, if it's just physics, is this just like circus stuff? Right. Is this the circus arts, really? Is this just fake, in other words? Did Chuck dupe me somehow weirdly into doing another circus article? So the thing 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.

Yeah, 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 going to be a lot easier for that break to propagate. Things like, if you look at a board, the reason why you're using something like pine rather than a hardwood, it's not because hardwoods are like harder, they're more resilient. The prine's 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 board or you break concrete or something like that. You're transferring force from your body into this inanimate object. And in doing so, you're creating a resonance in it

that is hopefully enough to overcome the object's natural resonance and break it apart. And 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 much more resilient. It's much more elastic. And so it's going to resonate more than break, compared to, say, like pine.

So this is another example of how physics 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 sensei 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. Yeah, so is that true? Is it the boards that are breaking the other boards? Yes. And are you really just breaking that first board, or is it the first few?

No, because if you think about it, if you stop, if the place where you're going to break through stops, like, say, right before the third board, 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? Right. But yes, when you break through that first one,

you're punching through to the next one and punching through to 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 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 through the whole thing all at once, and your hands is going to turn to mush. So in theory, you would only be able to punch through

as many boards as your arm punch length? Yes. OK. Right. Well, so here's the deal. Is board breaking just for show? Is it 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. 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, it is only for show. Bruce Lee even 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 sideshow trick, even though it's not a trick trick. And then it doesn't do anything to further martial arts. Right. It's just sort of a thing to get attention.

And I liked how this article kind of put 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's definitely not a true gauge of your progress as a martial artist.

No, but like I was reading about the 1976 Tokyo Karate Open, I think. And 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 could 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 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? No. I took Taekwondo as a youngster. And I was like, wait a minute, wait a minute. We're just like kicking the air. I wanna like, what are we doing here? And it became very clear that there was a long path ahead

of me to wherever I wanted to be. And I was like, I don't know, I'm not doing this. I'm gonna go home and eat some Twix. Peanut butter or caramel? Peanut butter. I'd eat caramel if it was around, but peanut butter was always my favorite. Yeah, do they still make those peanut butter Twix?

Yes, they do. So good. Yep. 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 punch through this much glass in this much time or a man who punched through, a lot of them are time-based, like this many pieces of glass while humming

the theme from Mash. Like it seems like you can just make anything up 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'm done. That guy's the world record holder for awesome. That's pretty great. Just to even think about that. I wanna 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, there's a rule against downward elbow strikes because it's thought that they're possibly lethal. So they're an illegal move. And the legend is that the reason is because a UFC commissioner was at a board breaking competition and saw somebody break a bunch of boards or concrete with their elbow and did not realize

that there's a lot of physics involved and went back and immediately made this rule. No downward elbow strikes. It's obviously you can kill a man like that because I saw some dude break some boards with his elbow. Isn't that interesting? Yeah, I don't watch any of 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. Oh, I used to love boxing growing up. It holds up. Yeah, I just, I think when the heavyweight division sort of got less interesting post Tyson.

Oh yeah? Yeah, I just, I was into it growing up with like the legends like Marvin Hagler and Roberto Duran and Sugar Ray Leonard and Tyson and Spinks and Holmes. It just, Ali, of course, it was one of the premier sports and it's just, I don't know, when I'm trying to figure out which Klitschko 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 it, 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 Klitschkos, that's all. Okay, well that explains it, Klitschkos. 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.

And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. All right, 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 enjoyed 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 are a few highlights. The year was 1960 and he was 12. This was 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 a frame or 20 cents per game.

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. That is 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 if Bowlers made him mad, he would offset one of the rear pins to decrease the chance of a strike. Good for him. Sticking it to the man.

This is from Ray Havorka. And he says, thanks a lot, my dad is 70 now and always lights up when he gets a chance to regale in his youth. So thank you, Ray Havorka and Mr. Havorka, for your work as a pin setter. Captain Doc Havorka Esquire. That's Ray's dad's name now, okay?

I love it. 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, stuffyshino.com and you can also send us an email. Just send it off to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,

visit HowStuffWorks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

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