Undoubtedly you have seen bricks being broken, even if it is only the context of pop culture. It seems damn near like a superpower, doesn’t it? Being able to pulverize a board or a brick purely with a movement of your hand—who wouldn’t want to learn how to do that?

As luck would have it, I’m going to teach you how to do so today.

First off, I’m going to let you in on a little secret—

50% of breaking is just positioning the object that is to be broken in the proper way.

What do I mean by this? Observe in the  featured picture that the block is suspended between two pillars

The lack of plasticity that ice has means that when force is applied to it, and there’s nothing beneath it, the path of least resistance is for it to shatter. Whereas if it were flat on the floor, I highly doubt that even the greatest martial artist in the world could break it with their bare hand.

Bear in mind that I said 50% of breaking is proper placement—you still need proper technique and brute force to break a board, brick, or ice block without shattering your hand or foot in the process.

Conditioning Before Breaking

Before you actually break things, I recommend conditioning yourself thoroughly for breaking. For the lower body you can of course do the iron body techniques that I discussed previously. But for toughening the upper body, you are going to have to familiarize yourself with two exercises—knuckle push-ups and striking hard surfaces.

For the knuckle push-ups, start on a soft surface like a carpet, and gradually workup until you’re doing it on asphalt or even gravel. The more the better! Also try a knuckle one-handed pushup with the same progression.

For the hard surfaces, try a makiwara or a sandfilled heavy bag. This can also be done to train the elbows, the knife hand, the ridge hand, and fingertips (fingertip pushups). You can also do sandblasting for the fingers, as I have discussed previously.

Anyway, once you are ready to break, the only thing left to do…is just to do it.

I like to break blocks of ice, because they’re cheap and they’re good for the environment. But if you want to do bricks or boards, be my guest.

You can get somebody to hold the board, get one of these wildly overpriced contraptions to hold it in the air, or put it on bricks as I have done.

As you can see in the video, my ice block is about 2 inches thick, and solid. In the video, I have done everything in one unedited cut, just to prove that I have not tampered with it in anyway.

As you can also see in the video and pictures, my knuckles were cut open. Breaking ice is not like beraking the flimsy balsa wood planks that the American Taekwondo Association uses—this is the real shit, and if you do it wrong, you can break a finger or hand. And even if you do it right, there’s surface injuries to beware of.

With all that being said, you can certainly implement this in your training.