Breaking

[exile]

That is not true, actually. Breaking is a product of the physics behind it. Depending on the material to be broken, you are either generating a minimal amount of power (demonstration boards for example), or a whole lot of power.
If you try to break, say, one board with a knife hand strike, and you fail, that energy rebounds back into your hand and up your arm. A knife hand strike can absorb a certain amount of power, so you most likely will not break any bones, unless you are very young.
However, if are trying to break several boards, patio blocks, ice, or bricks, you have to generate a considerable amount of power. If you fail, and that energy rebounds back into your body (and it will), you can easily shatter the hand or foot doing the break because of the physics involved. It would be not unlike ramming you hand or foot into a hard surface at 30 miles per hour. If the boards don't break, your hand will.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not minimizing the possibility of doing considerable damage to yourself in breaking. Because of a badly aligned fist strike to a 3.5" board strike three years ago, I spent six weeks with my hand in an very uncomfortable splint, and a typical 'boxer's fracture', as the OSU sports medicine people I was seeing called it.

But that was a result of my mistake. I'd used the same amount of force on the same size stacks many times before; either the break was successful, as it was most of the time, or it wasn't, but because my fist was aligned correctly, the unsuccessful strikes yielded only bad bruises at worst. I've done a certain amount of hand conditioning, but not enough that I'm unusual in the population; the reason I broke my hand on that one occasion was careless overconfidence—didn't focus on the delivery surface enough, and wound up implicating the knuckle of my little finger in the strike. You can imagine the rest. That's why I stressed that there seemed to me little danger unless you were careless. Careless means, to me, failing to align a strike you know how to do precisely enough, or trying to do a strike prematurely that you haven't worked your way up to.

I've generated at least as much power in the knifehand strikes I've done ever since my hand healed to the point where I could again start breaking (boards, that is). And never have I ever come close to damaging my hand (one of the great things about the knifehand strike, even when the break has failed: the delivery surface is all muscle, no bones), and a bruised hand is the worst I've experiences from that. So I don't think that breaking is dangerous if you take necessary precautions—just as I don't think sparring is, with the same caveat. If you're careless and you spar, you could wind up not just with a damaged hand, but with a full-scale concussion—and that is genuinely dangerous....

 

[YoungMan]

I would never do a head break unless I was 100% sure I could do it, especially against materials like brick or ice. The possibliity of concussion or worse is just too strong.

 

[exile]

I would never do a head break unless I was 100% sure I could do it, especially against materials like brick or ice. The possibliity of concussion or worse is just too strong.

Amen to that. Even if you don't concuss yourself, the cumulative effect of repeated head traumas is almost certainly horrific. Consider the following little tidbit: Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have found direct evidence that mild repetitive head injuries can lead to Alzheimer's disease. (See the full discussion here) This effect has also been known in the case of Parkinson's for a long time. And it gets worse: neurologists now believe that Repeated mild brain injuries occurring over an extended period (i.e., months or years can result in cumulative neurologic and cognitive deficits, but repeated mild brain injuries occurring within a short period (i.e., hours, days, weeks) can be catastrophic or fatal.
(discussed here)

It's astonishing to me that anyone would do a head break, ever, let alone make a career out of it, but those of you who saw that godawful Discovery Channel special on XMAs with Matt Mullins and Mike Chat a few years ago may remember a segment on breaking in which one of the guys interviewed is a specialist in head breaks, and is shown slamming his head into a line of concrete bricks. I'd hate to think about what his cortex looks like by now... assuming that any of it is left.

 

[YoungMan]

A study of many professional athletes, particularly boxers, football players, and hockey players will show you exactly what repeated contact to the head will do. Repeated concussions to the head over time produce definite brain injury, because your brain is literally rattled around inside the skull which kills brain cells.
Even if you don't do repeated head breaks, the impact goes back into the head and can do some serious damage, especially since there is no padding involved.

 

[Marginal]

Here is where I leave the usual TKD mind set.

I think most breaking is crap.

it teaches you nothing, it accomplishes nothing.

I'm not a fan of breaking either. I mainly see it as a means to develop spirit. Bouncing off a board will teach you not to hold back while delivering a technique in a hurry.

If I want to see if a technique "works", I'll go to the heavy bag for that.

 

[YoungMan]

Everything in Tae Kwon Do has a purpose and its place. The heavy bag suits a need, as does sparring, forms, basics etc. Breaking fills a need by allowing us to see the consequences of our technique (whether the board breaks or we break our hand). Aside from instilling confidence, it also makes us appreciate the power of Taekwondo. You can't, after all, practice full power technique on another human.

 

[exile]

It's true—that stack of boards represents a kind of existential challenge that a bag, even one equipped with a strain guage or other force sensor, never can be: the make-or-break nature of the strike. Not quite literally—my experience has been that you only break your hand if you're really careless/way overconfident, but even if you're being careful and realistic, a break which doesn't work is going to hurt. I've had enough experiences with an aching black-and-blue outer hand edge to know that I had better give the strike everything I've got, do my absolute best, or I'm going to pay for it. With a bag, you're really not looking down the gun barrel of a lot of pain if you get sloppy, careless, or—most common, probably—less than fully committed to the strike. That last, final extra bit of acceleration in the strike on a board stack is something you don't leave out when the alternative is the feeling that someone took a sledghammer to your hand...