Alasdair Monteith, who had been studying martial arts for twenty-five years, founded the British Institute for Chinese Martial Arts in 1994. Monteith, who at the time was a full-time gymnastics coach, believed there was, and still is, a need to teach Chinese Martial Arts as a professionally run sport, along the same lines as gymnastics. Since then, the club has grown so much that we now have four full time coaches, four assistant coaches, we run two adult classes every evening and teach approximately 150 children five days a week in six different primary and secondary schools, with more starting all the time.

We have had endless competition success with our teams winning well over 200 medals in competitions worldwide. Most notably, Alasdair represented Great Britain in the 3rd World Wushu Championships in 1995 and again in 2002 where he won a total of nine gold medals and two silver.

In addition to our teaching and competition success, we have acted as technical consultants for television, including Carlton TV and BBC advertisements, athletes for the JXL vs Elvis music video, gymnasts for the Queens Golden Jubilee Celebrations and performers and stunt doubles for various TV and Film roles. More recently, Alasdair was Director of Movement on several major theatre productions including The Young Vic's Christmas Production of Monkey. As our teams are so highly trained, we are beginning to get more television, film and theatre work. As well as running a full time martial arts association we have also recently started running a stunt school where we train people to deliver stunts and get the qualifications they need for the British Stunt Register. In addition to everything else, we have written many articles for the internet, health, fitness and martial art publications, including Time Out and have acted as consultants to solicitors.

All our coaches are fully qualified and insured to teach gymnastics and martial arts. They have all trained and competed in Malaysia, China or Singapore and as we are constantly in touch with our opposite numbers in the Far East they always have the opportunity to update their training.