Nobody in independent UK martial arts is doing more to raise standards, protect participants and drive change at national scale.
There's nobody else within independent UK martial arts doing more to improve standards and drive change across a membership body of this scale.
British Martial Arts & Boxing Association (BMABA) is A Professional, Independent Grassroots Martial Arts Governing Body
Our Key Functions
Supporting Clubs & Instructors
Championing Grass Roots Participation
Working Tirelessly To Progress Safeguarding
We're the only Martial Arts Governing Body Certified to both ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 27001:2022 under UKAS accreditation, and recognised in Parliament for our work on safeguarding and reform.
Some Of Our Key Contributions
01 We Grow Clubs
02 We Set Standards
03 We Verify The Workforce
04 We Change Lives
Ready to take your martial arts club to the next level, without the politics and egos?
See How We Can Help
A Different Generation Of Martial Arts Association
BMABA CIC is the UK’s leading independent martial arts association: a not-for-profit Community Interest Company supporting more than 100,000 members through a professional workforce of 6,500+ instructors, assistants and volunteers, across 200+ disciplines nationwide. Founded in 2012 with £20 of start-up capital, we’ve grown into a national institution without a penny of public funding, reinvesting more than £2.4 million into grassroots martial arts along the way.
What we do spans everything a modern sector needs and has never had from one place: insurance, safeguarding frameworks, DBS infrastructure, nationally recognised qualifications and CPD, club technology, and a live National Register that makes instructor credentials publicly checkable in real time. National bodies and style organisations build on our infrastructure, and our programmes, from scholarships for children in poverty to knife crime prevention and women’s self defence, put martial arts to work on some of the UK’s hardest social problems.
What makes us different is that we hold ourselves to standards nobody requires of us. Martial arts has no statutory regulator, so we built our own accountability instead: we’re certified to both ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 27001:2022 under UKAS accreditation, the first martial arts association in the UK to hold both, our safeguarding standards are approved under Sport England’s Safeguarding Code in Martial Arts, and our work has been recognised in Parliament.
And we’ve stayed what we set out to be: independent, member-first, and genuinely politics free. No committees, no closed networks, no shareholders. Just a professional, full-time team, answerable to our members and our mission.
Self-Funded Change.
Every programme we run is funded entirely by our own community, without a penny of public money. It’s a model that means we never wait for permission to act on the issues that matter, from getting children out of poverty and onto the mats, to tackling knife crime and getting more women into self defence. This is what grassroots sport can do for itself.
From £20 to 100,000 Members.
See how our founder, aged just twenty, took £20 of ‘start up capital’ and turned it into the success story that is BMABA. A true rags-to-riches story of a young lad growing up in poverty using martial arts to break free, and give back.
