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Karate tricks

thaiboxerken

Penultimate Amazing
thaiboxerken
Joined
Sep 17, 2001
Messages
34,550
So a guy claims that Ki is real.. Nothing new here. But he does make a claim about a demonstration that he participated in.

How would you explain that one elderly man could push over over 60 black belt, well coordinated students, lined up in a row, with one hand?

And here is my initial assessment of how the trick is done.

"Body mechanics plus the belief of the students that they will be pushed down. 60 people can not effectively coordinate to actually put their force onto the old guy. The first one or two people are effective, the rest are just getting in each other's way. The first couple of people fall, and the rest fall like a domino effect. It is a trick, although an impressive one."



Anyone have any other explanations besides "ki"?

http://www.karateforums.com/viewtopic.php?p=193477#193477
 
Martial arts is one of the greatest repositorys of trickery this side of the 'healing' arena.

Ki/Qi/Chee is handy because it can be used as an 'explanation' for any phenomena...and people in the business of separating students from their money are going to work it till it bleeds.

Board breaking, twirling antique weapons, pushing people over...all revolve around the concept of training the body to do something slightly unusual, and then dressing it up to appear more than it is...
 
For what it's worth, when I was in karate, we didn't discuss board breaking as anything "mystical", just as a proper application of force and technique. Of course, it also helps you train a bit for aiming, since you get a very strong negative feedback if you hit the edge of the board, not the center.

Completely agree that many of the claims seen in martial arts arenas are pretty damn woowoo, though.
 
Yep, the bleevers in Ki/Chi seem to use the exact same arguments and excuses that bleevers in psi, god or other paranormal things do. I'm closed and won't understand until I experience it for myself.
 
thaiboxerken said:

"Body mechanics plus the belief of the students that they will be pushed down. 60 people can not effectively coordinate to actually put their force onto the old guy. The first one or two people are effective, the rest are just getting in each other's way. The first couple of people fall, and the rest fall like a domino effect. It is a trick, although an impressive one."
Click to expand...


I agree thai. I've also simply seen some people take down some other people by 'hanging' on them as they fall.

There is also the related feat of a taijiquan person demonstrating his/her ability to not be pushed over; rooting, or just having a good stance in taijiquan. For example, see the "Lining up for the grand push" photo at http://www.wuweitaichi.com/photo-picnic.php.

It seems to me that the taijiquan person is simply resisting the push of the first person, possibly the second, but not the rest. They seem to think, perhaps, that the forces of all the people pushing are additive, so that by the time the push travels to the practicioner, the force is huge! Realistically, however, and I'm not knowledgeable in physics, I'd bet all the forces get dissapated, except the force of the person closest to the practicioner.

Since I believe a pull from the back has the same effect as a push from the front, I'd challenge the practicioner to having all these people pulling a rope that was tied to the practicioner, and see if the practicioner could withstand it by "rooting".
 
JSFolk said:
For what it's worth, when I was in karate, we didn't discuss board breaking as anything "mystical", just as a proper application of force and technique. Of course, it also helps you train a bit for aiming, since you get a very strong negative feedback if you hit the edge of the board, not the center.

Completely agree that many of the claims seen in martial arts arenas are pretty damn woowoo, though.
Click to expand...

Board breaking is a part of the training process that helps the student get over the fear of injuring their hands...it helps somewhat with focus as well.

Once it has been done, the student should be ready to move on to better methods (heavy bags and force pads for example) in their training, and not stack up more and more boards (sometimes with spacers betweeen them) in preparation for a multiple board breaking demonstration at a tournament, test, or at the mall.

If you were in a karate school that eschewed all of the demo/testing multiple board breaking showmanship, you were in a rare one.
 
Ahh.. a tug of war test. Nah, that wouldn't work, the chi can't travel along the rope.........

I suggested that he push a car with it's parking brake on.
 
I've never done a board break. But, then again, boards have never really offended me.
 
thaiboxerken said:
I've never done a board break. But, then again, boards have never really offended me.
Click to expand...

Yeah, but don't try to convince me that you haven't done the coconut break on your forehead at least a hundred times...
:p
 
Remember, don't try this at home! LOL

This cocunut guy is nutty. Watching the creative coconut break clip, I was laughing a bit. He's sitting there karate chopping the coconut and he fails to break it the first few hits. I can almost hear his thoughts "holy jesus freaking christ this hurts!".
 
This reminds me of the "magnetic girls" that paraded through the midwest back around the turn of the century -- incredible feats of strength, etc., based entirely on leverage and body mechanics.
 
JSFolk said:
For what it's worth, when I was in karate, we didn't discuss board breaking as anything "mystical", just as a proper application of force and technique.
Click to expand...

It also helps if you cut the wood across the grain, and then bake in in an oven beforehand to make it nice and dry.

Roof tiles are good too, because although they're really quite big and brittle how many people have ever tried to break one with their hand?

When I was doing Southern Mantis Kung Fu they occasionally broke roofing tiles at demonstrations. I was too junior to be allowed to break tiles on stage myself, so I amused myself by breaking up the broken bits into smaller bits afterwards. I'm no Bruce Lee (although I'd been doing martial arts on and off for a decade or so by this point), and it's much harder to break a small bit than a big bit, and I had little difficulty.

Two anecdotes that arose from this.

#1. I was a mere yellow belt. I showed an orange belt from another branch of the school how easy it was to pop small chunks of roof tile, and he popped a bit himself. I then pointed out to the small crowd of kung fu students around us that this act of breaking was actually significantly harder than the ones our seniors had performed on stage. Dead silence, feeble excuses, let's move right along now guys.

#2. One of the purple belts couldn't even break her two tiles. My sifu later claimed to the class that this was because they were extra-special, wire-reinforced roof tiles. Funny, because I broke the bits of tile up into smaller bits with my own hands and I never once saw a wire anywhere.
 
Having had to do roof repairs with tiles, it's actually obvious that you need to be careful NOT to break tiles - they are actually quite brittle, and will break with little pressure at all. I was carrying two, one in each hand, and one banged against my knee accidentally - a corner broke off, and I had to get a replacement. Poop.

Heading into our 9th year in karate (brown belt), Zeplette and I have both done a few board breaks. They are much easier than they appear IF you hit them square and along the grain. One of the 20-something lower-grades actually broke one over his knee by simply leaning on the edges!
 
As a youth, I spent a summer as a brick mason's helper.
Those guys could grab a red brick from a pile and pop them in half like they were candy...pure physics, no 'Cheee' required.
 
Randi had an anecdote about buying some "karate boards" from a supplier for a demonstration he wanted to do; the guy warned him to be real careful with them.....

There are all sorts of such tricks; breaking big blocks of ice is a common trick at demonstrations. You can cut the block in two, dose the cut ends with salt, then re-freeze. Looks good, but quite fragile.
Same with rocks/bricks. Rocks can be almost invisibly rejoined, and look quite authentic.

Another popular item is arrow-catching. One guy used to do this fairly often...but he used arrows with "flu-flu" fletching, which really slows the arrow down.

And, as some wag noted, nothing is made stronger by setting it on fire....
 
And, as some wag noted, nothing is made stronger by setting it on fire....

Including Richie Barathay?

;)
 
Here is a post by a bleever at the karate forum.

"thaiboxerken thinks only science can prove anything. Science can only make determinations from the information that it has already "proven" to itself. According to science, physics in particular, any movement at all is impossible.
I also happen to believe that science with a closed mind is not science at all. If we all went around thinking things this way then nothing new would ever be discovered.
Some people like to camouflage a closed mind as a logical, scientific mind. However, it's mostly these individuals simply fooling themselves."

Can you notice the similarities to arguments given by other types of paranormal believers?
 
crimresearch said:
As a youth, I spent a summer as a brick mason's helper.
Those guys could grab a red brick from a pile and pop them in half like they were candy...pure physics, no 'Cheee' required.
Click to expand...

Bricks, tiles, wood with the grain as opposed to against it, and concrete have relatively little tensile strength.

That's how rebar works. If you look at a piece of rebar, it has little ridges on it. Just sticking it into concrete helps a bit. However, to do a real job, you stretch the rebar and cast the concrete around it. Then you let the rebar go. The little ridges compress the concrete just a bit so that moderate strain just relieves compression rather than causing tension.

That's also why quenching, case hardening, and tempering work. They put the material at the surface in compression.
 
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