Breaking (martial Arts)
Breaking is a martial arts technique that is used in competition, demonstration and testing. Breaking is an action where a martial artist uses a striking surface to break one or more objects using the skills honed in their art form. The striking surface is usually a hand or a foot, but may also be a fingertip, toe, head, elbow, knuckle, or knee. The most common object is a piece of wood, though it is also common to break bricks or cinder blocks.
Breaking can be often seen in karate, taekwondo and pencak silat, Spetsnaz are also known for board, and brick breaking, but not all styles of martial arts place equal emphasis on, or use, breaking. In styles where striking and kicking is less important and there is an emphasis on grappling or weaponry, breaking is less prominent. Traditional Japanese martial art schools place little, if any, emphasis on board-breaking, although the art of breaking objects was known as tameshiwari, while the similar practice of Tameshigiri or 'test cutting' is used in sword arts.
Breaking is based on physics and selection of materials- the most commonly seen breaking involves spaced, softwood boards. While very difficult to break even a piece of soft pine wood hitting against (perpendicular to) the grain, breaking is almost always done with (parallel to) the grain- which requires little skill or strength. The use of spacers means instead of breaking the entire stack at once, they break one at a time- each one helps break the next as little momentum is lost and gravity is helping. Because of this, breaking is primarily used as an advertising gimmick to woo potential customers.
Read more about Breaking (martial Arts): Types, Materials, Technique
Famous quotes containing the word breaking:
“Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligator comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)