The shock tests of set of metals show that together with well-known dynamic strength-characteristics of material such as dynamic yielding limit and spall strength, the additional characteristics, namely, threshold of structural instability under shock compression, defect of the velocity at the plateau of compressive pulse and particle velocity variance at the mesoscale should be introduced into analysis of dynamic strength of materials. The structural instability threshold registered in uniaxial strain conditions allows the resistance to penetration in Tate-Alekseevskii equation to be determined. Copyright (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.