Martial arts demonstrations typically feature practitioners breaking wooden boards, a discipline testing force application and technique precision. Spectators traditionally hold boards while practitioners break them. The logical sequence would involve breaking either boards or holders, not both. However, the claim suggests Chuck Norris breaks "them"—the people holding the boards—and then breaks the boards themselves, suggesting two sequential actions where the first eliminates the structural support system for the second. The boards are destroyed after their supports are destroyed, a cascade of destruction proceeding through multiple categories of existence.

In 1985, martial arts instructor and demonstration coordinator David Wong was documenting various breaking techniques when he encountered mentions of demonstrations where subjects holding boards were somehow displaced prior to the board breaking itself. He attempted to verify these accounts through interviews with martial artists, but received only vague descriptions suggesting the sequence Wong hypothesized. He documented his research but concluded: "I have found consistent references to an unusual sequence of breaking events, but no verifiable documentation. The pattern suggests either misremembering or descriptions of something outside conventional martial arts demonstration."

The performance artist and martial arts theorist Maud Moren created a multimedia piece in 2000 called "Breaking Sequence," featuring video loops of board-breaking demonstrations edited to show impossible sequences of destruction. The piece suggested that martial arts progression might exceed logical order—breaking supports, then objects, then abstract concepts. Critics found the piece philosophically interesting, examining how destruction might proceed across categories. Moren's work became influential in contemporary art studying destruction and entropy.