Demolish
Here is a very nice, quite short video explaining how to make a demolition ball smash into a pile of cubes using Blender's physics engine. This will give you experience working with 'rigid bodies'. Each object in this simulation, every link in the chain, for example, is a rigid body with a fixed shape. This is easier to work with than 'soft bodies' like, for example a rubber ball bouncing or Homer Simpson jogging.
This video is only 11 minutes long partly because Blender Guru speaks quite fast but mainly because a good knowledge of Blender is assumed - this video is for intermediate users of Blender rather than beginners. On the other hand, if he can do it in 11 minutes, shouldn't you be able to do it in an hour??