How Difficult is Breaking Ice?

Ice is very hard and yet like many hard substances can be broken if struck just right. If you take a small block of ice and strike it with a hammer, you may find it very difficult to break the first few times you hit it. In general, the larger the block of ice the more difficult it is to break. When people break ice they often describe the size of the ice in pounds. While a 150 lb block is certainly larger than a 100 lb block of ice, the difficulty of the break is determined by several factors. First the dimensions of the block must be considered. The width and height (thickness) of the ice are directly related to the difficulty while the length is inversely related (the longer the easier). The second factor is the scoring. Scoring or cuts across the width of the ice, generally on both the top and the bottom allow the ice to have a “weak point”. While this may sound like cheating, it is considered necessary by most to allow a clean break. Lastly, a word about breaking multiple blocks of ice. Some people believe that if you stack up several blocks of ice on top of each other, whether two or ten, all you have to do is to break the first one and the rest break by themselves. This is not entirely true, and yet when dealing with 150 lb blocks of ice there is most certainly a lot of potential energy provided by the mass of the ice. This makes it difficult to judge the skill or power involved in the strike, although this type of demonstration has certainly become a crowd pleaser. I believe the better way to increase the difficulty is to increase the thickness of the ice, although this can be hard to do. Even producing a 20 lb block of ice in your freezer can be challenging.

One last word about technique in breaking. Another way to increase the difficulty in a breaking technique, whether in ice, concrete, or wood, is to shorten the distance that the strike travels. For example, jumping two feet into the air and coming down on the object with a full swing requires less expertise than simply standing and swinging your hand from three feet above the object. Likewise, striking from a distance of 12 inches, 6 inches, 3 inches, and 1 inch are progressively more difficult and require more skill and coordination. As noted in my post on Iron Palm, some practitioners will “cheat” by quickly drawing the hand back before striking.