Weapon Wednesday

Bone!

Bones are 4 times stronger and 40 times more stress resistant than concrete! That is if you take proper care of them of course. If you have ever broken a bone it may be hard to believe but our bones support an amazing amount of force just keeping us standing up straight. That force gets drastically multiplied when we walk, run, jump or fall (sometimes the force gets multiplied too much and you get to see what your bones look like...or bones get bent or twisted which they really don't like). Bone is one of the strongest materials found in nature. One cubic inch of bone can withstand loads of at least 19,000 pounds or close to 10 tons!

We take this strength for granted because it is so reliable. Even if you have broken something at some point, your skeleton has had a fantastic track record of success and safety.

We can turn this wonderful strength into a tool for destruction, however. We have all seen demonstrations of people breaking bricks, boards, concrete, etc. with their hands, head, feet or whatever else. If you haven't seen anything like it, look it up on YouTube, hopefully your first couple of videos are of successes...

It's not muscle that makes this dominance over the inanimate possible. It is focus, speed, gravity, your mass, and your bones.

The smaller the better!

Why not large bones? If you take all the force built up from the rotation of your body, gravity, muscle and/or etc, and transfer the total through a small area of impact you multiply the force. If you have a large impact area the force is dispersed and reduced on contact. It's why you try to make contact with large muscle masses evenly with stage falls as opposed to taking gravitys wallop all in one tiny place. 

Besides breaking inanimate things you can also break faces, tissues, and even other bones!

Many martial arts incorporate bone strikes in their blocks to create damage to the attacker while defending themselves. Again, why we use muscle mass to muscle mass when blocking in stage combat.

Using bone strikes can be vicious in choreography and audiences always cringe if you simulate some sort of bone break. No one likes to hear bones really hitting something, however. The bone impact sound against any surface makes people nauseous and concerned for your (or the actors) safety.

Makes you think twice about how badass of an animal we are!

Greg