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I am writing this long overdue article partly in response to Richard Bolstad's fine article, “Providing heroic challenges on Trainings” (5). As usual, Richard is clear and detailed, and does an excellent job of demystifying heroic challenges by helping us understand much of the simple physics underlying them.
My wife Connirae and I have used ropes course challenges in trainings, and we can verify how useful such challenges can be, especially for some people. One young Native American woman who had started serious drinking when she was 12 had a truly life-changing response to succeeding at these physical challenges. However, for a former army signal corpsman who had climbed trees to string telephone lines under enemy fire, it was something of a “snooze,” since he had already faced far more difficult challenges.
The cooperation required by many ropes challenges is also a very valuable living metaphor for many people who have not previously experienced that, due to our society's (and NLP's) imbalance in emphasizing individual achievement over cooperative effort.
In the first section of Bolstad's article, “The science behind the magic,” he writes about a martial arts test that he experienced, in which the point of a sword was placed against his larynx just above his sternum and “while holding my breath, I then leaned forward so that my entire weight was resting on the sword.”
He states, “Like most of these tests, the one I endured was largely based on a physiological fact that most students will not know. In this case, the fact is that the cartilage surrounding the trachea is quite hard.” I would like to add a little more to this “science behind the magic.”
During a delightful visit to my home a few years ago, when Richard demonstrated his position during this test, he was leaning at about 30 degrees from the vertical. Since Richard is a bit over 6' tall, I'd guess that his larynx is about 5' from the floor. Since his weight is 190#, using simple geometry and the Pythagorean theorem, we find that at an angle of 30 degrees, a scale under Richard's feet would register a weight of about 164#. Does that mean that the sword is only bearing 26#? (190#-164#) No, depending on the angle of the sword, it would bear about 85#—still pretty impressive, but a good deal less than half of Richard's “entire weight.”
Richard also writes that “The tip was sharp (he had first demonstrated this by cutting paper with it).” It is almost impossible to cut paper with the extreme tip of a sword, if for no other reason than because of the difficulty of keeping the tip exactly in the plane of the paper—either you miss the paper entirely, or you cut it with the blade behind the tip. I would be willing to bet that the tip of that sword was not nearly as sharp as it appeared.
I have examined the swords that sword-swallowers use, and both tip and blade edge are quite dull. They often sink the sword into a block of wood as an apparent demonstration of how sharp it is, but even a very dull blade of a heavy sword will stick quite nicely into the end grain of a block of wood. Magicians often use such “demonstrations” to impress and distract people from actually examining their props.
Granted, this is still a very impressive stunt, and not to be tried lightly, but not quite so amazing as it appears. To know whether this is anything more than a cute stunt we need it a controlled experiment in which some of the people who are tested have had the “iron shirt” Chi Kung training that Richard had, while others have not—though it might be hard to find willing subjects!
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