Breaking boards with spacers?

When using spacers the challenge becomes keeping your wrist locked into place and making primary contact like you want with the first two knuckles and then sustaining your speed and power through the subsequent boards. You need to be trying three boards or more to see if you can do this. When I was training in breaking that is actually what we started out with and would then progress from there. I got to where I could break six every time but seven would sometimes give me trouble and at about two bucks a board it was not cheap either. Breaking boards with spacers is a combination of both a speed and power break or what they sometimes refer to as a mixed or combination break.

We would also train for and do power breaks and then you are not using spacers for a lot of that and the medium you are using is just stacked back to back. I could break three boards consistently like that which was a lot cheaper when you consider it but the impact was much more on my hand and four always alluded me.

Breaking without spacers is way more difficult because each piece supports the other and you basically have to have enough power to go through all of them at once. With spacers that is not the case and your hand can pick up speed again as it passes through each board and they are not directly supporting each other like they are when just stacked.

Spacers make it easier for the wood to flex and break. One fifth degree I know does six boards spaced and suspended. The boards are not clamped, just stood on end, with equal spacing between. He does a front punch through them. The difficulty is increased, because he has to maintain a high fist speed over a greater distance. So, in rare cases like that, the spacers increase the difficulty of the break.

Most of the time, spacers make it easier for straight-through breaks.

But when the breaker is using impulse breaks, then spacers make it impossible to break - not because of difficulty, but because the first board or block doesn't break such that the force continues through to the second (and third, etc).

Breaking boards is weak