BMABA CIC

28/10/2026

🥋 The Autumn Budget 2026: What Does It Mean for Your Martial Arts Club?

Today's Budget includes several announcements that could affect independent martial arts clubs and instructors across the UK.

👉 Business Rates: Expanded relief could mean significant savings for eligible clubs operating from dedicated premises, including dojos and training centres.

👉 Minimum Wage: A 3.9% increase means clubs employing instructors, assistants or administrative staff should review their payroll costs.

👉 Mileage Allowances: Changes to business mileage rates could benefit instructors travelling between venues, courses and events.

👉 Fuel Duty: The existing 5p reduction has been extended until July 2027.

👉 Self-Employed Instructors: Proposed reforms to Self Assessment payments could make managing tax bills easier.

👉 Energy Costs: Household electricity measures have been announced, although clubs on commercial tariffs shouldn't assume these will apply.

We've put together a practical breakdown in our community, explaining what the announcements could mean for your club and what you should be checking.

Some measures are still subject to detailed eligibility rules and implementation guidance.

👉 Read the full article in the community: https://community.mybmaba.org.uk/c/regulation-governance/the-autumn-budget-2026-what-does-it-mean-for-your-martial-arts-club

22/10/2026

A quick security update for our members ☑

You may see coverage this week about a newly reported vulnerability affecting PHP, the technology that powers a large share of the world's websites, including WordPress.

If your website or club tools run on BMABA systems, you don't need to do anything. 👍

Our team was online late last night and again from 5am this morning, working alongside our enterprise hosting partners. PHP has been patched across our hosting infrastructure, additional hardening has been put in place, and we've checked the integrity of every service: our club management platform, Flo by BMABA, and WordPress by BMABA. There are no signs of any issues.

You trust us with your club's information and your members' data, and we take that responsibility seriously. It's exactly why we invest in a dedicated technical team, trusted development partners, enterprise-grade hosting with proper redundancy, and ISO 27001 certified information security management. When something like this hits the headlines, there's already a tested process in motion: spot the risk early, act fast, and verify everything afterwards.

We'll keep working closely with our hosting partners and vendors as this story develops.

If your website is hosted elsewhere, it's worth checking urgently with your provider that PHP has been updated. The vulnerability has been rated critical, and unpatched systems are likely to be targeted in the coming days.

If you have any questions at all, even if you're not a BMABA member but are worried about your website or tech, our team is always happy to help.

22/09/2026

We're filming today for a brand new enhanced First Aid CPD targeted for lead instructors and those in charge of emergency care, using specialist trainers and our amazing videographer. We'll be sharing the new content shortly!

21/09/2026

🚀 BMABA CRM V4 is now live

We’ve just launched the biggest update yet to BMABA CRM, our Club Management Platform.

V4 brings together a huge range of improvements designed to help martial arts clubs spend less time on admin and more time actually running their club.

Highlights include:

☑ GoCardless Direct Debit and Direct Bank Payments built directly into BMABA CRM
☑ Self-registration, so new students and parents can register, choose a membership and set up payment themselves
☑ More flexible memberships, including weekly, fixed-term and free memberships
☑ Easier upgrades, downgrades and membership pauses
☑ A new Bulk Editor for faster student administration
☑ Improved attendance and grading progression
☑ A new Documents area for policies, forms and handbooks
☑ Improved parent and family management
☑ Better CSV imports and exports
☑ Dozens of fixes, refinements and usability improvements throughout the platform

Stripe remains fully supported too, including the ability to link existing subscriptions to the correct students and families.

For clubs using GoCardless, once a Direct Debit mandate is in place, future membership payments can be collected automatically, making recurring payments much simpler to manage.

V4 is live now in MyBMABA.

We’ve also published a full changelog and feature breakdown in our Community Roadmap (https://community.mybmaba.org.uk/c/roadmap/club-manager-v4-full-changelog)

If you’re already using BMABA CRM, have a look around and let us know what you think. Feedback and bug reports are always welcome and genuinely help shape what we build next. 🥋

The Free, Award-Winning Club Management Platform for Martial Arts Built by martial artists, for martial artists. Powered by BMABA CIC — a not-for-profit, IS ...

17/09/2026

Stop planning sessions on the drive to the dojo. 🥋

Our new AI Lesson Planner is now live in MyBMABA, and it's free with every membership.

Build your session on a colour-coded timeline. Set the age band, skill level and styles, and let an assistant that actually understands martial arts fill the gaps, suggest progressions or rework a session that isn't flowing. Pull techniques and drills straight from your own syllabus. Then flip to the running order and teach from your phone on the mat.

It goes further than planning one class, too. Link your sessions together and the pedagogy and coverage views show you whether you're building on last week or quietly starting again, which techniques keep coming round, and what you always mean to cover but never do. Assign plans to real classes on your timetable, bring your whole coaching team in, and record what actually happened afterwards.

This is a ground-up complete relaunch of our prior AI lesson planner, and is now a fully integrated suite, in which you can share access with your colleagues too.

👉 Learn more: https://bmaba.org.uk/clubs/uk-martial-arts-association-governing-body-instructor-membership/ai-martial-arts-lesson-planner-tool/

Already a member? Log in to MyBMABA and open it here: https://mybmaba.org.uk/resources/lp/

16/09/2026

🎉 GoCardless integration approved!

We’re thrilled to confirm that GoCardless has formally approved our application, meaning we can now bring Direct Debits, Direct Bank Payments and other GoCardless facilities directly into our Club Management Platform.

We’re just crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s ahead of an anticipated full release to members on Monday 21st September.

And GoCardless is only part of the update. The release will also include dozens of new features, improvements and bug fixes, including:

• Self-registration and self-purchase of memberships for students and parents
• The ability to run the membership system using £0 / free memberships
• Further improvements across club and membership management
• And plenty more

Keep an eye on our Roadmap in the Community for confirmation of the launch and the full changelog; https://community.mybmaba.org.uk/c/roadmap

15/09/2026

We've just received our first CIMSPA endorsement! 🏆

Child Safeguarding in Martial Arts, part of our Gen 2 CPD library, has been formally endorsed by CIMSPA, the Chartered Institute for the Management of Sport and Physical Activity, against the Safeguarding and Protecting Children professional standard. It's been awarded 3 CIMSPA CPD points, and it passed every one of the moderator's five criteria with no actions required.

For our instructors, that means the safeguarding training you complete through BMABA now carries independent, sector-wide recognition from the UK's chartered professional body for sport and physical activity. If you're a CIMSPA member, the points count towards your professional status. If you're not, it's still a national standard behind your certificate when clubs, venues and parents ask.

Everyone who has already completed the Gen 2 course is automatically included. The course was endorsed exactly as it stands, so your certificate now carries the CIMSPA Endorsed mark and the 3 CPD points, ready to re-download from MyBMABA whenever you need it.

For us, this one is bigger than a single course. Gen 2 was built from the ground up: our own platform, our own assessment methodology, IVY as an AI learning assistant, and the safeguarding expertise and standards work behind every module. This is the first time all of that has been put in front of an external moderator, and it mapped to CIMSPA's professional standard exactly as we'd designed it to. The moderator specifically highlighted the martial arts contextualisation, the reflective assessment, and IVY's role in supporting learners.

So this is the first of many. More submissions from the Gen 2 library are already on the way.

Full details here: https://intercom.news/bmaba/157337-child-safeguarding-in-martial-arts

As an award-winning martial arts association we can provide access to online and face to face martial arts safeguarding qualifications for clubs, instructors and staff.

04/09/2026

🚀 Launching Monday: the new integrated MyBMABA Hub

We’re really excited to share one of the biggest changes we’ve made to MyBMABA in a long time.

From Monday, we’re launching a completely rebuilt Hub designed to make managing your club, your team and your compliance much simpler and much more joined up.

Whether you’re a solo instructor or managing several clubs with a larger team, the new Hub brings everything together into one place.

You’ll be able to:

✅ Manage multiple clubs from the same Hub
✅ See instructors, assistants and wider team members together
✅ View DBS/PVG, safeguarding, First Aid, insurance and other compliance in one place
✅ Update grades and teaching status
✅ Manage insurance options
✅ Add instructors, assistants and students directly
✅ Track DBS/PVG applications across your team
✅ Check whether BMABA training has already been completed and verify it automatically
✅ See your Regulation Ready and Club Colours position much more clearly
✅ Access your membership and key documentation without hunting around MyBMABA
✅ Make confidential accessibility disclosures so we can better support you when you need help

We’ve spent months looking closely at the realities of running a martial arts club, including what creates unnecessary admin, what should be automated, and what instructors and management teams need to see at a glance.

A lot of things that currently require you to contact our team will now be handled directly through the Hub, with purchases and changes taking effect automatically wherever possible.

You don’t need to do anything ahead of launch.

When you log into MyBMABA next week, you’ll see a refreshed main experience and the new integrated Hub waiting for you.

We’re carrying out final testing over the weekend and currently expect to release it mid-morning on Monday.

Read the full announcement here:
https://community.mybmaba.org.uk/c/bmaba-hq/launching-monday-the-new-integrated-mybmaba-hub

02/09/2026

Launching on Monday: the new BMABA Lesson Planner

We've rebuilt our AI lesson planner from the ground up. Not an update, a complete revamp, live for members from Monday 7 September.

Build your session on a visual, colour-coded timeline. Type freely to an AI assistant that understands your class by student age, style, lesson focus and more, ask it to fill a block, suggest progressions, or just give you some inspiration when you're stuck. It pulls techniques and drills straight from your own syllabus in Dojo Manager, so plans are built from what you actually teach too.

Every session goes into your club's lesson bank to reuse or hand to another coach, with a phone-friendly running order for the mat, scheduling against your club timetable in the CRM, and pedagogy tracking across weeks so you can see whether you're progressing or repeating.

Free with every BMABA membership. No licence, no per-coach fee.

Full details: https://bmaba.org.uk/clubs/uk-martial-arts-association-governing-body-instructor-membership/ai-martial-arts-lesson-planner-tool/

31/07/2026

We've been collecting feedback from alot of clubs over the past few months, and one of the first few things we intend to release now we're 27001:2022 'badged' is a new integrated, fully unified Hub.

As MyBMABA has grown with our membership, we appreciate its become a bit disjointed and at times, difficult, to quickly update your team, access documents and so forth.

Our solution is a new integrated portal, within MyBMABA, that remove the clutter, confusion and multiple menus - just a simple, unified place to see and manage your membership, your team and any insurances.

We'll be BETA testing this with the Roadmap community (in MyBMABA) in the next couple of weeks, and hoping to roll it out in September. We think it could help cut down admin time (and confusion!) by a huge amount, so we're very excited to share it with you as a community when its ready.