BMABA CIC

24/06/2026

We're being asked by lots of clubs whether they should remain open during the current hot weather. ☀️

As with most things, the answer is: it depends.

If you're training in a venue that is already extremely hot, where mats and equipment are becoming uncomfortable to use, and you're expecting a room full of children who may already be tired, dehydrated, or struggling to regulate their temperature, it may be sensible to consider postponing, adapting, or cancelling sessions.

Conversely, if you're fortunate enough to have a well-ventilated or air-conditioned facility, and you take appropriate steps to account for hydration, rest periods, and the needs of your students, training may still be entirely appropriate.

Ultimately, the key question is whether the environment and activity remain safe for those taking part.

In the event of an incident, insurers will typically ask the same questions regardless of provider: Was the activity reasonably safe? Would 'the prudent uninsured' have made the same decision? Were appropriate steps taken to manage foreseeable risks?

Every club, venue, and community is different. As an organisation, we're leaving the decision to individual instructors, who are best placed to assess local conditions and the needs of their students.

If you do decide to cancel or modify a session, how you compensate students is entirely up to your club. Some instructors may choose to run an alternative activity, invite students to attend another session, extend a future class, offer account credit, or simply make a decision based on what works best for their members. There is no one-size-fits-all approach.

Please err on the side of caution, particularly where children, older adults, or anyone with additional health considerations may be affected. A modified session, shorter class, or cancelled lesson is always preferable to an avoidable medical emergency.

Finally, this is a good opportunity to refresh yourself on the signs and symptoms of heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Heat exhaustion can often be managed with prompt action, cooling, and hydration. Heat stroke, however, is a medical emergency requiring immediate assistance. Ensuring all coaches and volunteers can recognise the difference is an important part of keeping students safe. Our new First Aid CPD within MyBMABA includes guidance on recognising and responding to both conditions.

Stay safe, stay hydrated, and look after your students. ☀️

23/06/2026

📣 Two new CPD courses now live on MyBMABA

We've just added two brand new pieces of continuing professional development to the MyBMABA learning suite, both built to help our coaches keep raising the bar.

🥋Coaching Children and Young People in Martial Arts
A practical, safeguarding-aware course covering how to coach, motivate and protect the youngest members of your mat. Free to all Silver and Gold members, and to registered Assistant Instructors.

🧩 Curriculum Design and Pedagogy in Martial Arts
For coaches ready to think more deeply about how they structure their syllabus and teach it. This one digs into curriculum building, lesson design and the teaching principles that make grades meaningful and progress stick.

Both courses follow our full CPD format with interactive resources and a final assessment, and they count towards your ongoing professional development record.

Log in to MyBMABA to get started. 🥋

22/06/2026

🌡️ Extreme heat this week, please keep your members safe

The Met Office has issued Amber and Red Extreme Heat warnings across Monday to Thursday, with temperatures peaking at 38 to 39°C on Wednesday and Thursday. This is a serious weather event, and your juniors are most at risk: they overheat faster than adults and often will not say when they are struggling.

⚠️ Watch your young people closely for flushed skin, dizziness, headache, nausea, cramping or unusual quietness. If you spot it, stop that child's session straight away, move them somewhere cool, get fluids into them, and contact a parent. If they don't improve quickly, treat it as an emergency.

Our advice in short: don't hesitate to cancel where conditions are unsafe, especially junior classes on Wednesday and Thursday. If you do run a session, shorten it, drop the intensity, keep everyone out of direct sun, and build in regular water breaks. And if a grading falls this week, postpone or adapt it rather than pushing through in the heat.

We've published a full briefing in MyBMABA covering gradings, cancellations, and mitigations if you are running classes 👇

Hi there,

17/06/2026

🥋 Generation 2 CPD is here, and it changes everything.

We've just completed the single biggest upgrade to BMABA CPD we've ever made. Every single course has been rewritten from the ground up, fully up to date as of June 2026, with the latest laws, legislation and best practice built right in. Nothing is as it was. Pioneering new technology now makes every lesson interactive, not just a wall of text, with proper accessibility built in.

Here's what's new 👇

✅ Our SENCO award is now SEND in Martial Arts, split into Level 1 Practitioner and Level 2 Coordinator

✅ Trauma-Informed Coaching now comes in Level 1 (Foundations) and Level 2 (Practice)

✅ A clearer coaching pathway: Foundation Coach (L1), Qualified Coach (L2), and a brand new Senior Coach (L3)

Plus a whole set of courses we've never offered before:

🏛️ Club Management Award (Level 1 & 2)

🎪 Event Ready event management CPD

🥇 NROA refereeing & national officiating award

🧠 CHIMA Second Edition, our revised concussion award, built on protocols approved by Professor Mike Loosemore MBE, Chief Medical Officer for GB Boxing

🧩 Coaching Neurodiversity award

👟 Cadet Coaching Award, designed specifically for under-18 coaches
..with three more courses already on the way.

And importantly: none of this wipes your progress or touches your verified records. Your qualifications, your National Records verification, Regulation Ready status and Club Colours all stay exactly as they are. This is an addition, not a reset. 💛

Where appropriate, every course has been mapped to CIMSPA professional standards, and we'll now be starting the process of submitting our CPD for formal CIMSPA endorsement, one course at a time.

📖 Read the full update here: https://intercom.news/bmaba/148849-introducing-generation-cpd--every

Or head to CPD in MyBMABA to get started. 🙌

Hi there,

04/06/2026

Club Manager 4.0 is here, and it's our biggest update yet. 🎊🎉

We've rebuilt some of the parts clubs told us slowed them down most, and added a few things we think you'll love.

What's new:
✅ Faster student onboarding, mass editing, full import and export, NOK copy-across and more.
✅ Attendance that finally adds up, combining across your linked classes and following students when you move them
✅ A brand new documents area for your policies, handbooks and waivers, with built-in "I have read and understood" tracking
✅ A spreadsheet-style bulk editor for adding and editing students in bulk
✅ Self-service memberships, so families can sign up themselves when you want them to

And it's almost entirely shaped by your feedback, which is exactly how we want to keep building.

What's coming next? A major payments upgrade is already in the works, including Direct Debit through GoCardless and a complete refresh of our Stripe card payments, to make collecting fees simpler and cheaper. More on that very soon.

Read the full rundown of everything in 4.0 here: https://intercom.news/bmaba/146766-club-manager-4-0-is-here

14/05/2026

🎉 A milestone few weeks for BMABA. 🎉

Three back-to-back external audits, three strong results:

✅ ISO 9001:2015 surveillance audit passed clean. Zero non-conformities, zero OFIs raised. This is a UKAS Accredited award.

✅ ISO 27001 Stage 1 cleared, no non-conformities. Stage 2 is scheduled for early July, putting BMABA on track to achieve what we believe will be a world-first for independent martial arts governance.

✅ Cyber Essentials successfully re-certified under the UK government scheme.

Huge thanks to our entire team for pulling this off alongside the day-to-day. Helen, Niki, Kirsty and Giovanni have lived and breathed audit prep for weeks. Bella, Anna, Cat and the wider customer services team have plugged every gap. Christina has held the Strategic desk through Helen's absences. None of this happens without them.

And to our members, thank you for your patience while we've been buried in this. The credentials we hold are the credentials your club benefits from. AXA, CIMSPA and our other industry partners work with BMABA precisely because of work like this. It's the unsexy backbone of what makes BMABA credible, and it's what separates us from the dozens of self-appointed associations operating without external scrutiny.

Now the fun part! CPD launches, exciting new partnerships, the next version of our CRM and a long list of developments we've been holding back, all about to start rolling out. 🎯

Two places by narrow roads.

Hi there,

12/05/2026

We have a full team training session taking place between 10am and 2pm today (12/05) so please bear with us if you can't get straight through to the team as quickly as usual. 🙏

These full-staff sessions are an important part of how we keep our customer service at its best. They give us dedicated time to bring everyone up to speed on safeguarding practice, compliance updates, changes in law, our ongoing ISO work, CIMSPA lineage and the wider standards we hold ourselves to as a professional body. Stepping away from the desks together for a few hours every so often means the team comes back sharper, better informed and better placed to support our members.v

Usually we have a small team online but today is a 'big one'! We do apologise for any delay in the meantime, and we'll be back in touch with everyone the moment we're done. 👍

07/05/2026

Noticed we've been a bit quieter than usual the last few weeks? There's a good reason.

May is audit season at BMABA. Right now we're being formally assessed by a number of external, independent bodies, including UKAS-accredited certification through the British Assessment Bureau (ISO 9001:2015), CIMSPA as our chartered sector partner, and the Government's Cyber Essentials programme, which we've just been recertified under.

We hold ourselves to the same standard we ask of our members. When we ask you to keep your DBS valid, your first aid in date and your licence current, we think it's only fair that someone is checking our homework too.

The SLT may be a little less available than usual while these audits run. Day-to-day support carries on as normal.

We've also got loads of CPD, tech and other goodies building up this end which will be pushed out shortly, so keep an eye out. Full update on the news feed below;

Hi there,

22/04/2026

We've been formally announced by CIMSPA today as a new Training Provider Partner! 🥳

Launching early May is an entirely re-imagined suite of CPD, all mapped to the CIMSPA standards, and one-by-one, being submitted for formal endorsement.

Our Generation 2 (Gen2) courses will feature 'bang-up-to-date' guidance and best practice, professionally filmed expert interviews, digital flashcards, AI tutor assistance and cutting edge learning opportunities.

We have all of our current awards being re-published, and six entirely new pieces of work going live too - all included as usual with the various memberships.

Congratulations to BMABA CIC on becoming a CIMSPA Training Provider Partner! BMABA CIC is a leading independent martial arts body championing safer, more inclusive, and professionally-led martial arts across the UK. https://loom.ly/LvJ-u2I

27/03/2026

Big things are in the pipeline for our Club Management Platform (BMABA CRM), and the first of them is nearly here. 🔔💚

BroadcastbyBMABA is landing next week (we hope). Send emails and push notifications to your whole club, individual classes, belt groups, or specific members, all pulling automatically from the student and NOK data already in your CRM. Marketing campaigns, training updates, licence expiry reminders, newsletters -- no list building, no duplicate records, no extra setup. Just powerful broadcasts with your club branding applied automatically.

Around the start of May, a major usability update will hopefully be ready to roll out. Mass editing, custom register views, a refreshed interface, attendance that carries across classes for unified grade progression, CSV import and export, and a simpler student creation process are all part of the same release. Day-to-day management is getting significantly faster.

And over the summer, ahead of the September return to dojo, GoCardless direct debit integration arrives! 💪

Set up a membership, send a digital mandate by email, your member authorises it once, and payments run automatically from there. No chasing, no manual renewals. Alongside GoCardless we are completely overhauling the membership view; one clean overview per student or NOK showing exactly what is active and full controls to pause, adjust, discount, or update without jumping between screens.

Lots to look forward to. Watch this space.

Hi there,