Breaking
- Thread starter rickster
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Sensei Payne
Black Belt
The skill lies in executing a tech. properly and fluidly.
If you don't punch through the baord..you will hurt your hand...
personally..I go with Miagi on this one.
"why break board, what did they do to you?"
If you don't punch through the baord..you will hurt your hand...
personally..I go with Miagi on this one.
"why break board, what did they do to you?"
MaxiMe
Brown Belt
Champ-Pain
Blue Belt
I can't help but to think that this question is in response to my last post on the thread "Watered Down M/A".
How does breaking wood make you a Martial Artist?
How does it improve your fighting skills?
It's a marketing tool... all breaking wood does is make the students feel good about themselves and forces the parents into dishing out some cold hard cash.
Nomad
Master Black Belt
Breaking is a test of the breaker's technique, specifically in physical and mental focus and in the application of power to and through a target, and provides immediate (and occasionally painful) feedback to the martial artist.
If the breaker's physical focus is off, the board or brick won't break.
If the breaker's mental focus is off, they won't break.
If they don't hit through the target, they won't break.
Obviously, it's possible to vary the difficulty of the break depending on the skill of the breaker; stacking boards or bricks, doing different types of breaks (precision breaks, speed breaks, etc), or using unusual techniques to do the break.
If used correctly, it can be a good training tool to work on these specific aspects of a martial artist. If it's the end goal of training, then it's at best a misguided focus IMO.
It is a very popular part of demonstrations for the onlookers because it's fun and impressive, and there's a definite element of uncertainty and even danger for the breakers (and their holders).
Champ-Pain
Blue Belt
It may be popular and fun to demonstrate breaking for unlookers - but how does it make you a Martial Artist or improve your fighting skills, in any way?
I think there is a difference in types of breaking.
In the Marine Corps, in boot camp, we had two courses. The Obstacle Course and the Confidence Course. Of the two, the Confidence Course LOOKED harder, but it was actually pretty easy. It just looked intimidating. The Obstacle Course was actually very difficult.
I never had any exposure to breaking before I started training, some three years ago. I have since been asked to try to break 2-inch concrete pavers twice. The first time, I tried and failed to break 3 2-inch pavers. The second time, I tried and succeeded breaking 2 2-inch pavers.
It's not a simple matter of building confidence when we do this. It's not easy. And it's not a simple matter of brute strength; I'm plenty strong. Some of the smaller people in our dojo break pavers easily and more of them.
I agree with the comments that breaking (in our case) involves learning focus, technique, and timing. Some even say it involves breathing and/or 'ki'. I won't open that can of worms except to say that our Sensei says it does.
Now that I've done it, I'm glad that I did. I won't mind doing it again, but I can't say I look eagerly forward to it either. It's just an adjunct, something we do pretty infrequently. But it's certainly not a trick or a simple matter of hitting hard. At least, not for us. Others may do things differently - for them, it may be more of what we called the 'Confidence Course' when I was in boot camp. Just something to build up your confidence.
In the Marine Corps, in boot camp, we had two courses. The Obstacle Course and the Confidence Course. Of the two, the Confidence Course LOOKED harder, but it was actually pretty easy. It just looked intimidating. The Obstacle Course was actually very difficult.
I never had any exposure to breaking before I started training, some three years ago. I have since been asked to try to break 2-inch concrete pavers twice. The first time, I tried and failed to break 3 2-inch pavers. The second time, I tried and succeeded breaking 2 2-inch pavers.
It's not a simple matter of building confidence when we do this. It's not easy. And it's not a simple matter of brute strength; I'm plenty strong. Some of the smaller people in our dojo break pavers easily and more of them.
I agree with the comments that breaking (in our case) involves learning focus, technique, and timing. Some even say it involves breathing and/or 'ki'. I won't open that can of worms except to say that our Sensei says it does.
Now that I've done it, I'm glad that I did. I won't mind doing it again, but I can't say I look eagerly forward to it either. It's just an adjunct, something we do pretty infrequently. But it's certainly not a trick or a simple matter of hitting hard. At least, not for us. Others may do things differently - for them, it may be more of what we called the 'Confidence Course' when I was in boot camp. Just something to build up your confidence.
Nomad
Master Black Belt
Hmmm... so you don't think having physical and mental focus, and being able to deliver power to and through a target could have any overlap with fighting? Interesting.
Of course, it is also related to the "confidence course" that Bill mentions... if you don't think you can't do it, then you'll hold something back, and you won't. I'd argue that this also can apply directly to fighting (though I'd also recommend other ways to train it as well, obviously).
Quoted for truth.
Or with Bruce lee " Boards....don't hit back"
I can show my 5 yr old how to break a board, not hard to do.
You can teach the same thing with a bag, shield or focus pads and not have the chance of having your students injure themselves needlessly.
IMHO, breaking boards is unimpressive and I don't include it in our training. I could never see the reason for it.
Have I broken bricks and boards?
Yup, purely for my amusement and nothing else. Although to be truthful, it got kind of boring and it didn't teach me anything I didn't already learn from a bag, shield or focus pads.
If you want to break stuff, knock yourself out and have fun. I just don't see the need.
Michael
SahBumNimRush
Master of Arts
From my stand point, there is a great deal of "parlor tricks" in the world of breaking (i.e. plained boards, spacers, "soft material" etc.. .) The stuff I see on ESPN, you could teach a baby monkey to do.. .
Beyond the physical and mental focus mentioned above, breaking allows for a martial artist to truly test their power and technique. Yes breaking a single board can be done at a young age and novice skill level. However, breaking 4+ boards at once with no spacers is not easy. Breaking concrete with no spacers is not an easy task either. I've broken baseball bats, 1x12's, 2x12's, concrete pavers, and blocks of ice. All of which are crowd pleasers at demos, and some of which are true tests of the amount of power you can generate. You obviously cannot hit your training partners full force, and striking the heavy bag does not give you the relatively quantifiable feed back that breaking does, IMHO.
For me it is less of a "training" tool and more of an "assessment" tool.
I have heard arguments from martial artists in the past that, "spacers don't make breaking easier." But I've never seen anyone from that camp break 3+ concrete pavers without the spacers.. .
Beyond the physical and mental focus mentioned above, breaking allows for a martial artist to truly test their power and technique. Yes breaking a single board can be done at a young age and novice skill level. However, breaking 4+ boards at once with no spacers is not easy. Breaking concrete with no spacers is not an easy task either. I've broken baseball bats, 1x12's, 2x12's, concrete pavers, and blocks of ice. All of which are crowd pleasers at demos, and some of which are true tests of the amount of power you can generate. You obviously cannot hit your training partners full force, and striking the heavy bag does not give you the relatively quantifiable feed back that breaking does, IMHO.
For me it is less of a "training" tool and more of an "assessment" tool.
I have heard arguments from martial artists in the past that, "spacers don't make breaking easier." But I've never seen anyone from that camp break 3+ concrete pavers without the spacers.. .
We don't do breaking in our branch of Ving Tsun, although my old Chinese Sifu did do some pretty impressive "soft" breaks at demos. I'm sure Dr. Rush is right and that properly approached, breaking can be a worthy test of your technique.
The trouble is that it also lends itself to those "parlor tricks" he mentioned. Back in the '80s I tried a bit of that... self taught. Once I got so I could do a minimal level of breaking three to four pavers with spacers, I was able to figure out how to do a lot of stunts including: shattering or shearing a brick flat on the ground, bending 1/2 inch thick iron re-bar rods with my throat, standing barefoot on the edge of the blades of sharp machetes, lying on a full length bed of nails while a student broke a stack of pavers on my chest with a sledge hammer. Oh, and I also figured out how to stack bricks or pavers (with or without spacers), strike the top of the stack and break whichever brick you asked me to break without breaking the others. A real miracle of chi control! LOL. Well, I only got it to work about 2/3 of the time, but that's 'cause I was still a starving grad student and bricks cost money. With more practice, I know I could have gotten better results. Moreover, I could teach these tricks to just about anybody who was willing to blow the necessary money at Home Depot and then ruin perfectly good building supplies. BTW I actually wrote an article on this for Inside Kung Fu back about '86 0r '87 called "Martial Arts Magicians". Somewhere I probably saved a copy.
Anyway, my point is that for everybody who uses breaking as a real test, there are probably several others for whom it's just a show. That's OK too. Shows are fun, as long as you know that it's 50% skill and 50% showmanship. Like the following clip. It includes some of the same stunts I figured out how to do, only done better. I really got a kick out of the Iron Skull training at around 3:58. It would come in real handy if you needed to break down a door and couldn't find a battering ram!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qHL2PSpecI&feature=related
The trouble is that it also lends itself to those "parlor tricks" he mentioned. Back in the '80s I tried a bit of that... self taught. Once I got so I could do a minimal level of breaking three to four pavers with spacers, I was able to figure out how to do a lot of stunts including: shattering or shearing a brick flat on the ground, bending 1/2 inch thick iron re-bar rods with my throat, standing barefoot on the edge of the blades of sharp machetes, lying on a full length bed of nails while a student broke a stack of pavers on my chest with a sledge hammer. Oh, and I also figured out how to stack bricks or pavers (with or without spacers), strike the top of the stack and break whichever brick you asked me to break without breaking the others. A real miracle of chi control! LOL. Well, I only got it to work about 2/3 of the time, but that's 'cause I was still a starving grad student and bricks cost money. With more practice, I know I could have gotten better results. Moreover, I could teach these tricks to just about anybody who was willing to blow the necessary money at Home Depot and then ruin perfectly good building supplies. BTW I actually wrote an article on this for Inside Kung Fu back about '86 0r '87 called "Martial Arts Magicians". Somewhere I probably saved a copy.
Anyway, my point is that for everybody who uses breaking as a real test, there are probably several others for whom it's just a show. That's OK too. Shows are fun, as long as you know that it's 50% skill and 50% showmanship. Like the following clip. It includes some of the same stunts I figured out how to do, only done better. I really got a kick out of the Iron Skull training at around 3:58. It would come in real handy if you needed to break down a door and couldn't find a battering ram!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qHL2PSpecI&feature=related
- Thread Starter
- #12
This thread is about breaking as perhaps to determine if it is necessary or has validity in martial arts. It has been said, as well as the consensus and research I have performed, that breaking develops focus, courage, and confidence. There may still have to be a level of skill, such as practiced methods to perform the strike with speed or velocity, which physics calls upon in order for the break to occur, despite perhaps not needing actual individualized power. (The concept of no actual individualized power needed maybe supported by people who are smaller yet broke more boards than larger people and people who had no martial art training.)
ralphmcpherson
Senior Master
When breaking good thick boards only a well timed, accurate kick will break the board, particularly if only held in one place (between thumb and forefinger ie. speed breaking) . You can kick the hell out of it and it generally wont break unless its hit dead centre, which is not easy with a jump spinning hook kick for instance. We use breaking as a method of testing accuracy. When someone kicks a normal padded kicking target at full speed its often impossible to tell if they were completely accurate, they basically could be 3 inches out and you still hear a loud crack and assume it was a great kick. Miss the centre of a board by 3 inches and it wont break. I know guys who can smash a kicking pad full speed, full power everytime, yet put a decent thick piece of timber there and it wont break because they are lacking in accuracy. Breaking is not the be all and end all, but it certainly can serve a purpose in my opinion. Just to clarify, I am talking about things that are hard to break, not a thin little piece of pine.
WingChunIan
Blue Belt
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i used to love breaking in my TKD days. MT didn't do any and neither does the Wing Chun that I have trained for the past decade. Breaking can be useful as a test of attributes and as a confidence builder. I have a target to be able to copy a demo done by one of my si bak where he punched a melon from contact barely damaging the outside but turning the inside to mush. Will it make me a better fighter? not by itself but the ability to focus my power and other attributes that will be developed by trying will increase my fighting ability when added to my other training.
Tamishiwari 試し割り (gyuk-pah in Korean for any KMA-ists on the thread) was originally meant as a means of testing one's diligence in makiwara training, which is how one conditioned their hands. While all of the comments about mental focus and proper technique mentioned by other posters are true, those were not the primary purpose of tameshiwari, as those skills can be evaluated without tameshiwari.
The point of makiwara training was to condition the hands, feet, shins, forearms, etc. so that one could damage an opponent without breaking their own striking surfaces. A makiwara is basically a wooden surface wrapped in some kind of covering (rope, cloth, etc.) to allow repeated striking without actually breaking one's own bones. The makiwara itself is usually either too thick to easily break or is mounted in such a way that it will not be easily broken.
In tameshiwari, the student demonstrates his or her conditioning by breaking things, such as boards (roofing tiles are popular in Korea) that one normally would have difficulty breaking with an unarmed strike. Focus and technique are kind of a given, and part of makiwara training is to develop that.
It should be noted that when the practice originated, they didn't have special boards just for breaking.
It should also be noted that tameshiwari is not a universal practice in martial arts. It is common in karate and experience with karate by taekwondo pioneers is why it ended up in taekwondo. I have seen that other martial arts do makiwara or equivalent training for the same purposes, but not all of them do breaking.
The equivalent in sword arts, tameshigiri, is also not universal. Tameshigiri 試し斬り means test cut, and the practice developed from sword smiths testing the effectiveness of the blade prior to handing it over to the buyer. Some are against it, some really like it.
And yes, it is fair to say that breaking and cutting inanimate objects is a crowd pleaser.
This is a martial arts forum. The subject tends to come up fairly frequently, so don't overestimate your own importance.
See my response to the OP.
If the school isn't doing makiwara training, then breaking is, in my opinion, extraneous. Yes, it makes students feel good about themselves... unless their technique is incorrect and they find that they cannot break the board in front of a room full of people. Seen it happen many times.
As for forcing parents to dish out cold hard cash, this is an ignorant remark. Nothing is forcing parents to dish out cash, particularly board breaking. Parents dish out the cash to pay for an activity for their kids, the same way that they do with football, basketball, or violin.
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Breaking won't help you fight better, but it will help you fight. Breaking is simply a tool used to help one build confidence. I don't know how many kids I see get so scared once you put a brick in front of them. They never break it until they build that confidence. The confidence starts to build with learning the proper techniques, then finally breaking. It takes skill and confidence to break.
During one of our belt promotions we had parents come up and try to break the bricks that the kids were going to do. All the women failed and all the men broke. The women all failed because they lacked the confidence. These were grown adult women that weighed in excess of 130 pounds. We have kids as light as 60 pounds break a brick. The one man that we had do 3 bricks broke the brick after some coaxing but really messed up his wrist, went to the doctors the next day it was hurting so bad (won't have adult parents attempting any more).
After each adult we have a kid come up and do one more brick than the adult attempted or broke. If adult did 1 then we had the kid to 2, and so on. No kid was older than 12 years old. What this did was one gave the kids that extra boost of confidence to break or do what an adult could not do or struggled to do ,doing it correctly with little to no pain vs. not being able to do or with major pain. Kids showing up adults while breaking a brick builds major confidence. Once they overcame this simple breaking thing then other things like fighting become easier also.
During one of our belt promotions we had parents come up and try to break the bricks that the kids were going to do. All the women failed and all the men broke. The women all failed because they lacked the confidence. These were grown adult women that weighed in excess of 130 pounds. We have kids as light as 60 pounds break a brick. The one man that we had do 3 bricks broke the brick after some coaxing but really messed up his wrist, went to the doctors the next day it was hurting so bad (won't have adult parents attempting any more).
After each adult we have a kid come up and do one more brick than the adult attempted or broke. If adult did 1 then we had the kid to 2, and so on. No kid was older than 12 years old. What this did was one gave the kids that extra boost of confidence to break or do what an adult could not do or struggled to do ,doing it correctly with little to no pain vs. not being able to do or with major pain. Kids showing up adults while breaking a brick builds major confidence. Once they overcame this simple breaking thing then other things like fighting become easier also.
This is not a bad thing in my opinion. Failure, even infront of a room full of people can teach a powerful lesson. You will fail in front of many people many times in life. So we need to teach this to our kids and then how to overcome that failure as well. This is why I teach TKD, not to learn how to simply kick and punch but the life lessons.
Most definitely. My point was mainly in response to judochampion/champ-pain's comment that breaking was all about making kids feel good about themselves.
Though honestly, I don't see anything wrong with that either, so long as the school isn't making them feel good at the expense of substantive instruction.
As others have said, breaking teaches (and demonstrates) the ability to generate and deliver power at levels you probably ought not be using in friendly sparring. It teaches proper technique, since it's MUCH more difficult to break with sloppy technique. It boosts confidence. It teaches perseverence.
And it's just plain fun.
And it's just plain fun.
Balrog
Master of Arts
That statement is incorrect. It is not a marketing tool. It is a training tool.
If the student cannot execute a technique correctly, s/he will not break the board. It give immediate feedback on what needs to be worked on. If the technique is executed correctly, again there is immediate feedback from the success of the board break. When one fails to break a board, there is incentive to learn correct technique: it never hurts to break a board, it only hurts when you don't break it. And as someone much smarter than I am once said:
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