Welcome to Turning Tiger Martial Arts in Cornwall. We offer private, one-to-one and one-to-small-group training in a number of rare and unusual martial arts.

Turning Tiger's head teacher is Sifu Damon Smith, who has practiced martial arts and East Asian traditions continuously for 45 years, studying under native Chinese, Japanese and Mongolian teachers. He worked and studied in the Far East, has a masters degree in East Asian Studies, and has worked as a consultant for both Oxford and Cambridge universities.

Turning Tiger is run exclusively as a private-tuition school, which allows us to customise training to our students' goals and aspirations, and make progress more quickly than is possible in large classes. Students are free to choose which combination of our martial arts they want to study, or just focus on one.

Kempo

Practiced extensively by the Japanese military, Kempo is the original eclectic group of martial arts from Japan. Kempo has historical Chinese influences, and modern Kempo has also been influenced by Western boxing and wrestling.

Xing Yi

Xing Yi is the grandfather of the so-called "Internal Martial Arts" of China. A Northern Chinese battlefield style, Xing Yi is based on the fighting strategies of twelve different animals, and retains an extensive range of battlefield weapons in addition to its barehand methods.

Choy Lee Fut

Choy Lee Fut is a Southern Chinese martial art founded by Master Chan Heung in 1836 from three older Southern Shaolin schools. We study the Bak Sing style of Choy Lee Fut handed down from Master Tam Sam. Choy Lee Fut is often described as a "multi-opponent" style and has a particular focus on dealing with multiple attackers simultaneously.

Baji

Baji is a robust and subtle internal martial art from North China. A favoured martial art of bodyguards for generations, our own style of Baji comes down from Master Huo Diange, the personal bodyguard of Pu Yi, the last emperor of China (who was also a Baji practitioner).

Old Yang Tai Chi

We study two different lines of the Old Yang Style of Tai Chi Chuan. Both are relatively combat-oriented when compared to modern Tai Chi. One line comes down from Master Yang Jianhou via General Li Jinglin, the other from Master Wu Quanyu. We sometimes refer to the latter as "Emperor's Guard Tai Chi," because Master Wu was a member of the Emperor's Guard.

Barildakh

Bukhiin Barildakh, better known in the West as Mongolian Wrestling, is an extensive and complex martial art handed down originally from the armies of Genghis Khan. While it is best known for its modern sporting form, it is actually a full martial art that has many additional methods that are "outside the rules" of sporting competition.

Yan Yi

Yan Yi is a little known art from the ethnic Chinese community of Malaysia. It is very unusual in that it has no techniques, but instead teaches continuous patterns of movement that can be used in both martial and non-martial ways.

Meihuazhuang

Plum Flower Boxing, or Meihuazhuang, was the main martial art used by the boxers of the Boxer Rebellion. The public face of the art is quite simple, but it contains a huge, formerly secretive, syllabus of additional methods, some of which go far outside the scope of martial arts. Meihuazhuang can be practiced standing on posts stuck in the ground and arranged in the shape of a plum flower, hence the name, which litterally means "Plum Flower Posts".

Baguazhang

The "Eight Trigrams Palm" is an internal martial art founded by Master Dong Haichuan in Beijing in the 1870s following a ten year stay in Mongolia. It is characterised by its famous circle-walking which has links to Daoist and Mongolian circle walking.

Shiliu Dianban Gunn

A very fast and very rare Shaolin weapons art specialising in the use of a medium length flexible pole, but also containing barehand fighting methods.

80s Karate

Our unique Karate combines the Karate of Master Kenwa Mabuni with Kempo, Shotokai and Ashihara Karate into a single style. For historical reasons, our Karate arose as a consequence of events that occurred in the Osaka area of Japan in the 1980s, which is why we refer to it as "80s Karate".

Pak Mei

"White Eyebrow" is the name of both the martial art and the Shaolin monk who originated it. Pak Mei has a reputation for having a fast, attacking strategy, but is actually very deep and subtle in application. A fictionalised version of the monk Pak Mei was made famous as the teacher of Uma Thurman and David Carradine in the Kill Bill movies.