Taking body punches is a fairly common display in karate. You just need to have very well-conditioned abdominal muscles, tense them just before impact, roll as much as possible with the punch, and tolerate a certain amount of pain.
It is rather difficult to knock someone out with a body punch if he is well conditioned, and expecting it. And I wouldn’t put it past Blaine to have some kind of lightweight pad under his shirt, although that probably wouldn’t be necessary.
I saw an interview he did on tv once, it was a while ago and I don’t remmeber which channel so I couldn’t find a cite, and he said his real love is doing the endurance challenges to see how far he can push himself and that the rest of the year he does magic tricks so that he can make money to pay for the endurance challenges.
A few years back I tivo’d a show, and there was a bit in the video where he had the mark hold some cards and he grabbed him by each wrist and shook his hands back and forth. About two minutes later he gave the guy his own watch. It was really amazing the first time I saw it, but after watching it a few times I hit slowmo on that scene and you could see him undoing the watch with his fingers as he shook the guy’s hand. It was an unbelievable bit of pickpocketing, and I was hella impressed with his talent.
Just makes me wonder all the more how much of the magic he can do by himself. I was rather surprised that it was possible, but I’d watched the scene about four or five times before I’d had a hint, so of course the misdirection worked.
This isn’t quite fair. Blaine is a skilled and talented magician. Give him a deck of cards or some other close-up props, ask him to walk out on the street and entertain people with good, strong, entertaining magic, and he can do it. In fact, he can do it very well. This is how he got started, and he was working some fairly rough neighbourhoods as well!
When the TV producers got hold of him and created the ‘street magic’ shows, they incorporated some methods and techniques that you may feel were illegitimate. That’s your call, and I won’t necessarily disagree. But Blaine is a very skilled and talented close-up magician.
Of course, the various ‘endurance’ feats he has done aren’t magic tricks and aren’t presented as such (AFAIK). They are something he wants to do and he can get big money TV deals to do them.