Breaking a baseball bat with a single kick is an impressive feat that requires a great deal of physical and mental toughness, not to mention technique, but there’s always someone out there looking to up the ante.

In this instance Master Chip Townsend is that man, wowing the crowds at an ISKA US Open World Championship Tournament by breaking three baseball bats with one powerful kick, resulting in a wince-inducing cracking sound that thankfully was due to wood snapping rather than his shin.

Training in martial arts since he was 13, the 6ft 3, 6th degree Taekwondo black belt has become a specialist at Breaking, holding no less than 14 International Sports Karate Association World Titles and several world records in this specialized discipline.

His talents have also led to the 37 year-old being featured on the likes of ESPN, FoxSports, The Discovery Channel, NBC’s ‘America’s Got Talent’, while he’s also become a motivational speaker who featured in the TEDx talk, ‘Changing The World One Kick At A Time’ last year.

‘Breaking’, or ‘Tameshiwari’ is defined by Wikipedia as: a martial arts technique that is used in competition, demonstration and testing. Breaking is an action where a martial artist uses a striking surface to break one or more objects using the skills honed in their art form. The striking surface is usually a hand or a foot, but may also be a fingertip, toe, head, elbow, knuckle, or knee. The most common object is a piece of wood, though it is also common to break bricks or cinder blocks.

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Of course it should go without saying that the old phrase: ‘Don’t Try This at Home’ applies here as this is undoubtedly the kind of extreme technique that requires skill, knowledge, preparation and supervision to be performed safely.

Even then things can still go wrong as Townsend himself acknowledges in his own biography, wryly stating that, When it comes to being onstage, I have broken world records [and] broken bones (most of the time they were my own).