There has always been an element of showmanship in Karate. They don’t call it a martial art for nothing. Brick-breaking and other crowd-pleasing demonstrations give Karate guys a perfect way to market the system to young, impressionable would-be tough guys all over the world who want to be feared and respected.
Say what you want about the other aspects of Karate — that it doesn’t teach you to fight very well, that the katas are mostly meaningless, etc. — you can’t deny that the raw power generated by their strikes is super impressive.
Karate guys do something that nobody else can do. You’ll never convince a pro boxer to try his hand (so to speak) at brick-breaking. The most flamboyant, in-your-face professional wrestler (who takes metal chairs to the face for a living) wouldn’t try this sort of breaking feat if you paid him. None of the loud-mouth, trash-talking MMA fighters will get anywhere near a brick with their bare fist.
So what do brick-smashing Karate guys have that everyone else doesn’t?
They are specialists.
These guys spent years developing this skill. It didn’t come overnight.
The two indispensable aspects of skill training are focused preparation and perfect technique.
Focused preparation
The goal of breaking a brick with your bare hand isn’t one you can pursue part-time. This is the sort of thing you must work on constantly, and for a long, long time. It’s not a hobby, it’s an obsession.
Stick the hand of one of these powerful guys in an x-ray machine, and you’ll find that their bones are larger and more dense than normal. This osteoclerosis is the result of year after year of intense training.
Without long-term goal setting and the will and self-discipline to follow through, these powerful men would shatter their hands and wrists on the first attempt at cracking a brick.
Perfect technique
It’s fine to dedicate yourself to a goal, but if you don’t punch properly, it won’t work.
Karate guys define their strikes down to the smallest detail. Nothing is left to chance. Of course, there are plenty of different opinions about what constitutes the perfect punch, but for their purposes, Karate punches work.
They know exactly how to move to get everything lined up properly so no power escapes in a useless force vector, and they know just what to do to maximize the strengths that they’ve developed over the years.
When years of conditioning are used to augment perfect technique, watch out!
Who cares about breaking bricks — I’m not a Karate guy
If this thought entered your head, you’re not alone.
Karate was once the dominant martial art, and there were lots of people who — probably mistakenly — believed that it was more effective in a street fight than wrestling, boxing, or other fighting systems. But lately it’s fallen out of favor.
However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t learn anything from these guys. After all, they can break bricks with their bare hands.
What you should take away from this is that all the conditioning and tough-guy attitude in the world won’t help you hit harder. But if you study and perfect your technique until it is defined down to the last detail, then you can use whatever level of conditioning you have to hit as powerfully, accurately, and effectively as possible.
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{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
A lot of people arrive at this article after using a search engine like Google to find out “how to break bricks”. While I never intended this article to be a tutorial on how to crack a brick with your bare hands, I can give you some insight into how it’s done.
The people who actually break single bricks with a bare-handed punch are using several tricks to accomplish the trick:
So basically, when you break a soft, scored salmon brick, you are using the edge of the bottom brick to crack the top brick. As long as you have tough knuckles (or use a palm-heel strike), it might just work.
Note: don’t actually do this. I don’t do it and either should you.
how can you tell when one breaks bricks that bricks is not scored?
michael
ps if so, how do you know from conditioning that you would be able to attempt to break bricks?
To whom it may Concern,
I am an instructor for several martial arts, and I am the one who does the brick breaking demos for our dojo “Pure Force Martial Arts Academy”. The comment above about soft bricks and scoring bricks may be used by those who lack the power or technique, but it is not standard for those who truly do the art or compete. I invite anyone to come to my dojo in 29 Palms, CA and personally inspect all of my bricks and their alignment and then watch in person as I break through them. This is an art I take very seriously and pride myself in.
I am a yellow belt in taekwondo the boards are not fixed to where if you barley touch them they will break ive been doin this for three months and will not sit here and let anyone tell me that what i do is basically fake Mr. Jim Lizarraga i bow to you and respect what you do
Nearly every brick demonstration I’ve ever seen has been done with the brick sitting atop two cinder blocks, and breaking in the middle (in other words the hand breaks it, not the corner of another brick). Using scored bricks etc isn’t karate, it’s a magic trick.
We’re probably focusing on two different things. You’re probably talking about breaking a paving slab with the forearm (like in the photo at the top of this article). I’m talking about breaking an actual building brick with the knuckles of the fist. Yes, breaking an actual building brick using the knuckles is generally a magic trick.
i study kenpo karate and i have to weight in on this. no generally speaking brick and board breaking are NOT tricks or fake in real (non-mcdojo) martial art schools, they are real in the sense that they are not altered or made of substandard materials. and yes it does take alot of technique, but that said after a few years i can do it no problem, i train hard but i am far from a big scary guy, the trick to it is bricks and boards are far softer then people think, bones can withstand about 50 times the striking force of concrete of the same size and width. (think if you had a model of a bone made of brick material and punched it, it would be easy to break) scoring is not fakery it is to ensure a clean break.
When I was testing for my belt there was a guy who was testing for his blackbelt and got caught for baking the wood he was breaking
As someone presently training to grade for my I Dan in ITF style TKD I can assure you that in my association there are no sub-standard materials used. This grading includes, patterns, sparring and power. Part of the power test is to break a London Brick Company brick with a forefist punch (1st two knuckles only). I have watched enough BB gradings and seen enough people fail to break and injure themselves into the bargain to know the difference between fake martial artists and the real deal. Unfortunately the phoney ‘artists’ out there get the real ones a bad name. My daily conditioning regime is as follows: 100 forefist punches, 100 backfist strikes and 100 knifehand strikes to each of a straw makiwara (Dallyon in TKD speak!), wooden makiwara and a sandbag. Thats 300 on each attacking tool per day, in addition to the usual press ups on the forefist during training. If we were using sub-standard materials a) I wouldn’t be studying this art and b) I wouldn’t be putting myself through such a regime to prepare if all I had to do was buy a cheap brick and score it. You really can’t generalise with such a topic as I’m sure there are phoney Karate, TKD, etc praticioners out there but these are in my experience the minority.
Respect to Mr Lazarraga.
Taekwon
Agree with Sensei Jim,I hold a 7th dan in Shorin-ryu karate and seen many people break bricks and other hard objects .I myself have broken bricks ,and the bricks used are the real deal.I don’t believe the thread writer knows what his talking about.
I have taken several different martial arts by this point in my life. I can tell you honestly that most “real” Martial Arts Studios neither score their bricks or stack them as the first comment suggested. No “real” Martial Arts studio would cheat their students like that cheapening all their work and years of training they put in to earn their belts. Most Martial Arts require their students to be able to break bricks prior to receiving their black belts. My family owns a construction company and I have grown up around building materials my whole life and I can tell you for a fact they used the very same bricks we had to break during my testing for construction purposes. Albeit they are not they the red bricks people might think of and they are larger and offer more surface area which makes them easier to break.
The bricks used at my testing were not scored, nor did it break cleanly. I stuck my brick and it broke where and the way I struck it which was just slightly angled and a little right of center. I also broke off another triangular piece due to the fact I struck it closer to an edge.
As for this whole breaking bricks with knuckles thing… I don’t know who told you Martial Arts practice doing something like that. When I was younger I got in trouble with several different masters for trying to toughen my hands by striking concrete walls and light posts with my knuckles. The only and strikes masters want are things like a hammer fist or knife hand in some cases, but usually only hammer fists are allowed for hand strikes.
the materials are all fake and designed to break. the bricks are as “real” as the chairs and tables in professional wrestling. continue feeling you have “power” or you’re a “specialist” because you spent thousands of dollars over several years in a mcdojo.
a cinder block is harder than a human hand. when’s the last time we’ve heard of someone’s hand being broken in half from a block?
someone’s jealous…my 9 year old son has been breaking boards, no not bricks…yet…for years already, I’ve seen many experts break multiple boards, bricks, blocks of ice and more….it’s all in the technique and PRACTICE but to compare these guys to “fake” wrestlers (i.e.WWF,etc.) is just ridiculous…
Some would say that if a 9-year old can do it, it’s really not all that impressive. It’s sort of like watching a dog say “I love you” on YouTube: yeah, it’s cute to hear a dog ‘talk’, but soon you realize that the dog really doesn’t speak very well…
Breaking specialists hit very, very hard. But there is no real-world application for those breaking skills. The skills don’t carry over to competitive sports competitons or to real-world fighting situations.
Breaking specialists, in my opinion, miss the point. The impressive thing isnt that they can break a block of ice. What’s impressive is the dedication and almost single-minded pursuit of a goal that would make most people turn and run away. They’re impressive not because they break a brick, but because they’re an uplifting example of the human spirit. The lessons we can learn from these people (and others like them) apply to much more than punching.