Card Tearing

Card tearing is one of the classic feats of hand strength. Taking a deck of plastic coated casino cards can be a great display of finger, hand and wrist strength. It provides new meaning to "cut the deck!"
If you haven't already - check out Adam Glass's blog and his recent video of tearing up to one and three quarters decks and look a bit further back and you will see him tearing decks wrapped in duct tape - in short - Damn strong card tearing!

I have been getting back into card tearing and switching over to the Dennis Rogers style of tearing that Adam, David Whitley and others use and it is going pretty well. But in order to practice card tearing you need cards (duh??!!) so on David Whitley's advice I placed an order with Amazon.com for 72 Casino decks.

Normally decks of cards will run you about a dollar a deck which can turn into an expensive habit. But with the 72 Casino decks you will end up about 34 cents a deck - quite a savings.
Which is good - however - Casino decks come in two varieties - normal and quite difficult!
There are Carta Mundi (sp?) decks that are a bit easier that Bicycles (concidered a "goldstandard" of sorts) and then there are the Aristocrats (Very hard). So while saving money you get hard decks - sort of a win-win if you appreciate getting stronger!

The good stuff about tearing:
1) Fun at parties
2) Finger, hand, and wrist strength
3) Learning tension and dialing in the right amount of tension

The Not-so-good stuff about tearing:
1) Can develop asymmetries since it is an activity typically practiced with one hand on "top" and the other on "bottom"
2) Thumb webbing blisters and tears
3) Getting blocked from attending Texas Hold'em tournaments and your local Bridge group

Card tearing can take different directions:
1) Full tears or Halfing a deck
2) Quartering a deck - or halfing the halves
3) Dennis Rogers will even tear a deck into eighths (sick - sick - sick strong!)
3) Wrapping in duct tape and halfing
4) Behind back
5) In oven mits
6) Adding cards to end up tearing two decks at once
7) Tearing knotches out of the deck
and others

I think for now I am going to focus on full decks (and adding cards) and duct tape variations with less practice on Quartering (this is where you can really tear the thumb webbing).
I'll pop up a video in the near future but just watch Adam Glass - lots to learn from him.
Card tearing was just on my mind after tearing 3 decks yesterday (one lesson from yesterday is that the thumb webbing handles tearing better if you rest between decks.)