How do martial artists break the pile of bricks?

[Grandpa Troll]

Originally posted by Zkribbler
To understand how martial artists break the pile of bricks, you have to understand the difference between tensil strength and compression strength.

Bricks have real good compression strength, which means you can stack them on top of each other to make buildings and such. However, their tensil (holding together) strength is much less. That's why those bricks to be broken are always placed between two uprights. The martial artist is trying to break them apart, not to smash them.

There's also a lot of training of the hand, so that it can withstand its impact with the pile of bricks.

And its also technique -- hitting the brick with the smallest amount of area contact to focus the blow; and hitting it with high speed, maximizing the momentum of the blow (m x v).

We trained by using Jung Kwon (Knife Hand inverted) into coarse sand and then into peas, no not the boiled kind but hardened peas. We also hardened our knuckles with finger tip pushups and bare knuckle pushup and by clapping between each push up. In addition we practiced hitting a board wrapped in rope, to toughen the outer skin. One can train the body as well as the mind. Again the idea behind breaking boards, bricks, slabs, tiles and bats are focus and release of energies upon a certain area at a certain time. Notice breakers who break massive stacks, that is no easy feat, they are driving through the pile or object.

Breaking the floating ribs is equivalent to breaking 4 one inch thick boards and the main rib cage 5 one inch thick boards. What keeps the ribs together is muscle and sinew.

Gramps

[Ecthy]

Thanks Granpa, some just don't know the difference between bull**** and different models of explaining the same thing.

[DaShi]

So Chi is bull****?

[Ecthy]

My point is the following: all the explanations we have for how this trick works are based on rather recent finding. Science has only found about how muscles and their coordination work during the past decades. These martial arts root in much older findings. Back in those days they had no molecular science to base their everyday findings upon and so came up with rather spiritual explanations.

But that is not important. What is important is the fact that they deduce the concept of focus. They just don't explain it with whatever biological finding we would come up with, they used the concept of Chi.

So when I say "you cannot grasp it the western way" it doesn't mean that Chi>science. It means that if you don't know the science you're basically doomed not to grasp it, unless you adopt another way of thinking. They developed it not out of science but out of their spiritual understanding.

So no, Chi isn't bull****, it's a concept, probably based in spirituality, free of science, to explain observations of the human physical nature.