Board Breaking
Posted by Doug Fri, 02 Jun 2006 20:42:27 GMT
My son, Joshua, has been in Karate for about a year. He started in the “kinder” program and then moved up to the youth classes. Board breaking is very exciting to kids. As part of his blue belt testing he has to break a board with a shuto (knife hand) strike.
He’d been building up to this for a while. One night he thought he was going to do it, but another student started before him. He stood there and watched and listened to the Sensei as she instructed the other student. It took the girl like 4 or 5 strikes before she broke it.
I was nervous about Josh not being able to do it either, so I had him practice on the plastic “breaking boards”. These are boards that fit together like a puzzle and are meant to break in the middle and then you put them back together again. Theoretically they have the same strength as wood. I had him do three good breaks on the breaking board. At that point we were out of time for the night.
It was a little sneaky on my part. I had forgotten my video camera that night and wanted him to do it on a night when I had it. So the next lesson I brought my camera and caught this video (~20MB Quicktime movie). This is the first time he’s ever attempted to break a real wood board. The original take was pretty good, but I went ahead and spruced it up in iMovie with some fun effects.
