You might think that punching a bucket full of sand over 10,000 times sounds like a bad idea, but one YouTuber showed that it can actually cause a 'crazy' transformation, alongside some unexpected results.
There's nothing more reliable than YouTubers for when you want to see how something – often unadvised and unsafe – would work, and there's countless instances of creators putting their bodies through hell just to see the end result.
For example, one YouTuber ran five kilometers every single day for a month without having seriously ran before, whereas another tried to significantly up his water intake with mixed results.
There are few challenges that are quite as ridiculous in premise than punching sand 10,000 times though, yet self-certified 'experimental stuntman' pigmie, real name Lucas, gave it a try just to see what it could achieve.
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Starting out he provided a baseline that he could then use to look back on after the challenge, showing the audience the size and condition of his fists alongside conducting a challenge to see how many 13mm wooden boards he could break before experiencing too much pain.
In this he was able to break a stack of two with quite strong pain in his hands, but three proved to be too much to handle.
After this, Lucas started his experiment that would eventually last ten whole weeks, racking up an average of around 1,000 punches per week in each hand, meaning that he actually punched the sand 20,000 times in total in order to achieve balance.
The process was initially incredibly tough as he was barely able to do more than 100 punches-per-day for the first few weeks, but his pain resistance eventually grew stronger, making the process far easier as a result.
While he reached a point where he was barely able to feel the effects of hitting the sand in his hands, he was still left exhausted and frequently experienced something he called 'impact sadness'.
"The best way I can describe it was essentially it was this feeling of melancholy, sadness, or like a depression that I had at the beginning and throughout each training session," Lucas explained.
"It was almost like because my fists were beginning to get conditioned, and I was not feeling as much pain as I did initially, maybe my body still internally recognized some sort of impact or pain, and trying to get me to stop put me in this state of sadness," he continued.
Thankfully the results at the end of the challenge were seemingly worth it though, as not only did his fists experience a 'crazy' transformation where they were visibly denser around the knuckles, but he also saw a dramatic improvement when breaking the wooden boards.
Not only was he able to get through four stacked boards with ease now, he comparatively felt far less pain, measuring around the middle on his pain scale whereas three boards before the challenge began neared the top end.
He revealed that he's unlikely to continue with the challenge as he fears that it could permanently affect the dexterity of his hands, but the end result was certainly what he was going for, perhaps to an even greater degree than expected.