From the blog "Blog Albert Hawking"
I will be the first to admit it, I am a nerd and proud of it. Anyway as I was watching my anime, Kenichi, a martial arts one I thought about it and wondered how people in the real world break the wood and how much force they hand has to break/withstand the force. So looking into it I found several weird sites, anyway 1 was good. First we assume that to break a piece of wood the mass hitting it is about the weight of the arm and hand so using said sketchy table found online (couldn't find male)