The girl was 11 years old. She was the most diligent student in my class. When I would demonstrate how to stand, how to kick, how to block, she would watch intently while the other children horsed around and blew off steam (which is kind of the point for a child’s martial arts class). But not Tammy. She went off and carefully set up the technique I had shown her, and practiced it repeatedly. Her brow furrowed when she was unhappy with the result, and she’d try again.

Recognizing that she was one of the ones there to seriously learn, I spent a lot of time helping her. She passed her yellow belt test on her first try, and that earned her the right to represent her class in our annual demonstration for parents and the city.

Her task was to demonstrate how to break a board with a punch. On the night in question, she bravely stepped up in front of 1,000 people and got into a good strong stance. My last piece of advice was, “Don’t worry Tammy. Just remember not to pull your punch. Visualize the point you want to punch as being about six inches behind the board, so you punch right through it.”

Bravely, she drew back and threw a good reverse punch. The board broke with a loud crack! The audience cheered, and my student pranced off stage with a huge smile on her face.

My child class at a demonstration in 1982.

Karate demonstrations often show supposed feats of strength like this. Some martial artists believe that there is a mystical power, called “Chi” that can be tapped into to give you superhuman strength. And certainly you can routinely see demonstrations of what looks like impossibly difficult skills. Martial artists have concrete slabs smashed on their stomachs with sledgehammers. They will chop through a three-foot stack of bricks, walk through fires, have heavy weights placed on them while they lie on a bed of nails, and so forth.

There are no mystical forces at play. Some of these are just tricks anyone can do, while others are applications of inertia, momentum, impulse and other physical phenomena that have nothing to do with woo or mysticism. And sometimes it is just run-of-the-mill strength coupled with years of conditioning the skin and bones of the practitioner.

So how is it possible that this little girl could break a 1/2″ board? The answer is quite simple: When we have children break boards, we use soft pine, and we align it so that we are holding the edges of the board with the grain. This makes the board very weak, and for children, we would sometimes help them along by applying a torque to the board with our hands as we held it. It takes little more than a light tap to cause the board to split under those circumstances. In fact, I remember one demonstration where the Sensei accidentally torqued the board a little too much, and it snapped before the child’s fist even reached it!

Why would we subject children to this if it’s a kind of trick? Why would we demonstrate this ability? The truth is partly because it makes a good show for the audience. But there’s a more important reason: If you want to defend yourself, it’s important to learn how it feels to hit something that isn’t a soft bag. You need to learn not to pull your punches, to focus your punch past the point of impact, and even how to handle a little pain when you hit something that doesn’t give.

Hitting that little wooden board pulls all those techniques together. If your technique is wrong, you’ll really feel it. And if you aren’t being helped by an eager board holder torquing the board for you, you won’t break it if you pull your punch at the end. Finally, it’s a great confidence booster for the student to see that they can actually break a board with their punch. It’s a bit of a rite of passage as children move up in the martial arts. This makes it a useful part of training, but it should never be confused for magic or some real feat of strength because it isn’t.

Sometimes a feat of strength or toughness is real. At the black-belt level, we would have 2×2’s broken over our arms and legs in the demonstration. I can report that this really, really hurts. And you could really break your arm instead of the board if you aren’t prepared and trained. In this case, the training consists of many hours of repeatedly smacking your arms and legs against hard poles or the arms and legs of a training partner. This toughens the skin and bones. Couple this with musculature built up over the years it takes to become a black belt, and your arms can withstand a lot of damage. Part of the technique was also to be able to keep your arm rigid under the force because if your arm moved down the force would be spread out over time and the board would not break. Then you’re just being clubbed.

We don’t do this to break boards. We do it so that we don’t get our arms or legs broken by kicks and punches from an opponent, or break them delivering the same. It is not an uncommon injury to fracture a bone when sparring – say for example you were going to kick someone’s thigh and they pull their leg up, so your shin contacts your partner’s shin at full power. Stuff happens. Conditioning means that by the time you have serious power in your kicks and punches, you and your opponent can take the damage without injury.

My style (Okinawan Goju-Ryu) along with others also uses a “Makiwara board” for toughening hands. It’s basically a board with cordage wrapped around it that has a very slight amount of give. Punching it provides the same feedback as the little board for my student: You really feel it if your technique is wrong. But it’s also used to build up calluses over the knuckles. My Sensei’s hands looked like mallets. Again, this is useful because the hand is fragile and easily broken if you hit a bone hard, as can happen both in real combat or in full-contact fighting. So, you condition your hands. Some of us opted out of this, fearful of losing dexterity because we worked in fields that need fine motor control. However, damage to your hands is a very real possibility when you are punching without gloves. The only time I was sucker-punched on the street, the other person went to the hospital with serious hand damage and I was fine. So we train to avoid that, which includes not just conditioning but how to make a proper fist and deliver it in a way that doesn’t break your fingers, knuckles, or wrist. Breaking boards is a good way to learn the right technique, and you can really tell when you did it wrong, but without sustaining serious injury.

But what about “Chi?” Didn’t Bruce Lee have a one-inch punch that could send people flying? Surely that’s impossible. And you may have seen Aikido practitioners toss around people much larger than they are with seeming ease. So what’s going on there? The answer is physics. Many martial artists may not even realize it, but the essence of many martial arts techniques involves the storing and releasing of energy by leveraging the kinematics of the body. For example, the famous one-inch punch is an example of transferring the momentum of your body into your fist at the exact right moment. So instead of shoving someone, which has a long release time, all the force of the body’s momentum gets released very quickly, which transmits a much higher impulse to the target. I have seen my Sensei accidentally break someone’s ribs with that technique, starting actually having his hand on his chest. No 1″ distance needed at all.

The way it works is through hip technique and knowing when to relax and tense your muscles. You rapidly rotate your body, transferring muscle power into rotational momentum. And at the right moment, you twist your hips and tense, and all that force gets transmitted down your arm and through your hand. The result, when done right, is a very powerful blow. But it’s not chi, and it’s not mysterious. Just plain old physics. The same hip techniques are used when kicking and punching, and it’s amazing how much harder a black belt can hit once they have learned this.

This is not to take anything away from Bruce Lee, who was an amazing martial artist. But I should point out that he was only about 140 pounds, and therefore would have been at a serious disadvantage against a heavyweight fighter. Lee himself said that Muhammad Ali would destroy him in a street fight. Strength and size matter.

Aikido is a form of martial arts that explicitly uses the attacker’s energy and momentum against him. A good demonstration of this is from, of all people, Steven Seagal. The clip below is from the old Merv Griffin show, and Seagal demonstrates the use of the opponent’s energy. Yes, Steven Seagal is (was) a real martial artist. At least before he gained 100 pounds and an equal amount of arrogance. However, watch this video for his technique, and not his explanation.  His comments about “energy” are silly. But his throws are a good example of how an opponent’s momentum can be used against them.

I think most people are aware of how some of the other “tricks” are done. Lying on a bed of nails is no big deal because there are a lot of nails. Therefore, your weight gets distributed very well, and anyone can do it. As for smashing bricks and multiple boards, look closely the next time you see someone do this, and you’ll notice that there are spacers between the boards or bricks. So the first brick you break is also accelerated down into the second brick along with your hand. When that one breaks, now you have two bricks moving along with your hand, helping to smash the third one. And so it goes. Take away the spacers, and the trick becomes impossible.

Then there is another entire class of feat that is just straight-up deception or stage magic. The people who use such techniques may be martial artists, but they aren’t demonstrating martial arts. They are demonstrating stage magic. For example, martial artists who claim to be able to catch bullets are always faking in some way. There is a whole branch of nonsense martial arts called “no Touch” that is supposed to use Chi to throw your opponents without even having to touch them. One of these ‘martial artists’ was so sure that it worked that he challenged any MMA fighter to a match. See the video below for the outcome of that.

Finally, I’d like to talk about the role of strength in martial arts in general. Let’s say my 11-year-old student had gone on to earn a black belt. Would she be able to fight an adult and win? Almost certainly not. The idea of little martial artists beating up on adults is a creation of the movies, and not reality. In fact, the first thing I used to teach my students was that if they were joining our dojo to learn how to beat people up, they were in the wrong place. If they thought martial arts would let them challenge a bully and win, they were in the wrong place. Because in the real world size matters, toughness matters, and meanness matters.

If you don’t have those things, all the training in the world won’t help when someone who loves fighting descends on you and begins hammering away. If you aren’t a fighter and you aren’t used to getting your bell rung, after the first punch your brain will start jibbering at you and you will forget everything you knew. To that end, perhaps one of the best benefits of martial arts training is to condition you to being hit so that your brain doesn’t shut down on you when it happens in real life. But that only happens if you train in a way where you are actually being hit and not just pulling your punches.

The advent of Mixed Martial Arts and the Ultimate Fighting Championship was very useful here. In the early days of these matches, legitimate Karate masters would challenge the brawlers — and get beaten severely. Stylized fighting is no match for size and aggression and some boxing or ju-jitsu training. Now, the MMA fights are carefully controlled by matching fighters up by weight class. And even in mixed martial arts, the best fighter in the world may not be able to move up even one weight class and remain competitive. A difference of 10-15 pounds is all it takes sometimes.

Back in the day, I sometimes taught self-defense for women. My task there was not to train women to beat up men because that simply wasn’t going to happen. The weight and strength differences are just too much. So instead, we would teach situational awareness and escape and evasion tactics. Learning how to spike an ankle with your high heel, then to kick off your shoes and run. We would teach women to carry their keys in a way that would allow them to punch a pain point or gouge an eye with a key, then kick off the heels and run. But most importantly, we would teach women how to stay out of dangerous situations, how to evaluate threats, and how to not look like a victim.

Running away from someone a lot bigger and/or meaner than you continues to be the best form of self-defense. Martial arts are a great way to learn how to control your body better. You will be a better fighter with martial arts than without, all else being equal. Martial arts will teach you balance and coordination, and you might learn some culture along the way and gain flexibility and extra confidence. It might allow you to handle an untrained opponent in an impromptu encounter. But it won’t turn you into a wrecking machine, and it won’t allow you to carve a path through the local tough guys who like to fight. It won’t allow you to beat up an attempted rapist. Because strength and aggression still matter. A lot.