The main objectives of this study are to understand the complex shockwave‐structure interaction, in addition to the influence of the side‐on pressure profile generated by the detonation of an explosive charge on simplified torso surrogates’ responses. To achieve those objectives, rigid and deformable rectangular parallelepipeds (RPP) and cylinders were exposed to a spherical explosive charge of C‐4 of 0.3 kg at three different heights of burst. With pressure gauges positioned flush with the structures surfaces at different locations and an accelerometer to measure the kinematic parameters on the deformable torso surrogates, four hundred fifteen reproducible measurements were obtained. The cylinder model showed reduced impulses, accelerations, velocities and displacements compared to the RPP which offers more resistance to the blast. From the deformable surrogates, it was shown that the peak of acceleration is influenced by the pressure‐time history despite similar maximum impulses, which is not the case for the velocity and the displacement. It is inferred from this that the peak of acceleration, sometimes used to evaluate protective systems, seems not so good a metric that expected to quantify the changes in lung injury by wearing protective clothing. However, the maximum of velocity and displacement seems to be good candidate parameters for thoracic injury criteria definition.