Before Taylor Lautner was a dreamy werewolf in the Twilight saga — and even before he was tween superhero Sharkboy in the 2005 Robert Rodriguez film The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D — he was a child martial arts star. 

The actor, who plays a youth football coach in the family comedy Home Team, has plenty of youth sports experience of his own. He began doing extreme martial arts at 6 years old, which, as he explained during a 2018 appearance on The Jonathan Ross Show, is a combination of traditional karate and gymnastics. 

After sharing a clip of himself at about 12 years old demonstrating his skills with a bow staff, he joked that he still uses his karate experience "on a daily basis in back alleys."

In reality, though, "I became a black belt at the age of 10, and then when I stopped doing it at 14, I was a four-time world champion," he said before demonstrating a standing backflip — while wearing a suit. His athleticism has come in handy over the years, using parkour as a bike messenger in the 2015 film Tracers and some of his martial arts training in the 2011 action-thriller Abduction.

In Home Team, Lautner plays Texas Pop Warner football coach Troy Lambert, who gets a hand coaching his 2012 season from someone overqualified for the position: New Orleans Saints head coach Sean Payton (Kevin James), suspended from the NFL for a year for his involvement in an illegal scheme involving payments for harmful plays. Watch this space, because maybe we can get Lautner to do a backflip for us someday, too.