Martial Arts Professional: NAPMA’s Trade Journal for School Owners

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NAPMA has published Martial Arts Professional since 1996. It is the trade journal of the martial arts school business, and it is the place the association’s reporting, history and awards are published.

Volume 1, Number 1 was the Winter 1996 issue; by July of that year the magazine was publishing monthly, and it ran in print for roughly fifteen years before moving to digital publication. Across three decades it has documented how martial arts schools were actually operated — what they charged, how they enrolled and kept students, how instructors were trained and paid — in the words of the people running them.

What it covers

  • Reported business news — consolidation, investment, platforms, regulation and the wider fitness economy schools compete inside.
  • Marketing and enrollment — how schools reach people who have never trained, and what it costs per enrolled student rather than per lead.
  • Pricing and profitability — tuition structure, average ticket, margin, and raising rates without losing a student base.
  • Staff and systems — hiring and developing instructors, and the operating documents that let a school run without the owner on the floor.
  • Teaching and curriculum — class design, belt structure, and instruction for students who need it delivered differently.
  • Industry history — the people and institutions that turned martial arts instruction into a profession, much of it recorded nowhere else.

The columnists

The journal is written by people who have done the thing they are describing. Its continuing columnists are Grand Master Stephen Oliver, MBA, the publisher; Grand Master Jeff Smith, Chief of Instruction; and Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D. Its archive carries twenty-two contributors and, alongside them, guest authorities invited from outside the profession when the subject reached past the dojo.

The Lifetime Achievement Award

NAPMA and the journal jointly confer the Martial Arts Professional Lifetime Achievement Award for career contribution to the martial arts as a profession. Eleven people have received it, from Joe Lewis through Grand Master Jhoon Rhee, Fumio Demura, Ernie Reyes Sr., Grand Master Jeff Smith, Grand Master J. Pat Burleson and Nicholas P. Cokinos, to Chuck Norris, inducted posthumously in 2026. The register and the full citations are published at NAPMA and in the journal.

Reading it

Current articles publish at MartialArtsProfessional.com and are free to read. The print archive is indexed by issue, and articles carried over from the print edition are labelled From the archive so readers can tell reporting from record.

Disclosure. Martial Arts Professional is published by Martial Arts Marketing, Inc. / NAPMA. Grand Master Stephen Oliver is Publisher and is also Founder of Martial Arts Wealth Mastery, a separate coaching company. Coaching offers are labelled as such and are not editorial endorsements. The journal’s full editorial policy is published.

What NAPMA Standards Mean for Students at Your School

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NAPMA is an association of school owners, not a school. Students never join it. But whether your school works to its standards changes some things you will notice on the mat.

The National Association of Professional Martial Artists exists to raise the standard of how martial arts schools are run — how instructors are trained, how children are kept safe, how programmes are structured, and how a school stays open long enough for a student to reach black belt. Students and parents do not join NAPMA. Their school does, and the effects reach the floor.

Instructors who keep learning

A black belt is a qualification in martial arts. It is not, on its own, a qualification in teaching eight-year-olds, or in running a class of thirty, or in recognising a child who is being bullied at school. NAPMA association gives a school access to continuing education for its instructors on exactly those things: class design, teaching students with ADHD and autism, conflict resolution, injury prevention and the craft of running a room. Schools that use it produce instructors who teach better, not only instructors who fight better.

A safeguarding standard the school did not write alone

NAPMA’s Safe Training Environment Standard sets out what a professional school should have in place: instructor screening, supervision rules, boundaries between adults and children, reporting procedures, and how a complaint is handled. It is public, so any parent can read it and hold their school to it.

The point of an external standard is that it does not bend to the convenience of the school applying it. A school that adopts one is accepting a rule it cannot quietly rewrite when the rule becomes inconvenient.

Programmes built to be finished

Most people who begin martial arts stop within a year. That is a curriculum and teaching problem far more often than a motivation problem. Much of what NAPMA publishes to its school owners concerns programme structure: how a beginner course leads into an intermediate one, how progress is made visible, how a leadership track gives senior students a reason to stay past the point where the novelty has gone. Students at a school that thinks about this are more likely to still be training in year three.

A school that is still there next year

A martial arts school closing is not only a business failure; it strands its students mid-programme, sometimes after they have paid in advance. The unglamorous half of NAPMA’s work — pricing, staffing, retention, financial controls — exists so that fewer schools close. A student’s progress depends on institutional stability more than most parents realise.

NAPMA does not rate, rank or recommend individual schools, and association is not an endorsement of any particular school’s teaching. It means the school has joined a professional body and has access to its standards and training. What the school does with that is still the school’s own work — which is why watching a class before you enroll matters more than any badge on the window.

What to ask your school

  • Are you a NAPMA school in the association, and what do you use the association for?
  • Have your instructors completed continuing education this year, and in what?
  • Do you follow a written safeguarding standard, and may I read it?
  • How is the programme structured from white belt to black belt?

About the association

NAPMA has served martial arts school owners since 1993. It maintains professional standards and continuing education for the profession, publishes Martial Arts Professional, the industry’s trade journal, and administers the Martial Arts Professional Lifetime Achievement Award. More about NAPMA.

Looking for a Martial Arts School? What to Check Before You Enroll

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Choosing a martial arts school is mostly a question about the adults in the room, not the style on the sign. This is what the National Association of Professional Martial Artists tells parents and adult students to look at.

Most people choosing a school compare the wrong things. Style, belt colours and price are the easiest to see and the least predictive. What actually determines whether a student stays four years and comes out better for it is how the school is run: who is allowed on the mat with children, how instructors are trained, what happens when something goes wrong, and whether the business is stable enough to still exist next year.

Ask about screening and supervision first

Anyone teaching or assisting with children should have been background-screened, and the school should be able to say so without hesitating. Ask directly:

  • Are instructors and assistants background-checked, and how often is that repeated?
  • Is there a rule against an adult being alone with a child — in the office, in a changing area, in a car?
  • Can parents watch every class, without arranging it in advance?
  • Who do you tell if something concerns you, and what happens next?

A school that has thought about this answers plainly. A school that has not will treat the question as an accusation. That reaction is itself the answer. NAPMA publishes a Safe Training Environment Standard and a checklist setting out what a school should have in place; both are public, and you are welcome to take the checklist with you.

Watch a class before you sign anything

Sit through a full class in the age group your student would join — not a demonstration, not a private introductory lesson, an ordinary Tuesday. Look for:

  • Instructor-to-student ratio. Can the instructor actually see everyone? A large class is not automatically bad; an unsupervised one is.
  • How correction is delivered. Standards should be high and the tone should not be humiliating. Discipline and shaming are different things.
  • Whether children are learning or being entertained. Both extremes exist. A good children’s class is demanding and still fun.
  • What the senior students look like. The advanced belts are the school’s actual output. If they move well and carry themselves well, the programme works.

Understand what you are signing

Martial arts schools commonly use term agreements, and there is nothing wrong with that — a programme that takes three years to complete is honestly sold as a three-year programme. What matters is that the terms are stated in writing before you sign, and that you understand:

  • The length of the agreement and the total cost, not just the monthly figure.
  • What is included and what costs extra — testing fees, uniforms, equipment, seminars, tournaments.
  • How to pause or cancel: the notice required, in what form, and to whom.
  • What happens if you move, or if the student is injured.

Take the agreement home. A professional school will let you.

Look for signs the school is a business, not a hobby

This sounds unromantic and it protects you. Schools that close mid-term leave students without a programme and, sometimes, without the money they prepaid. Stable schools tend to share the same traits: consistent class schedules, staff who have been there for years, a clean facility that is maintained rather than merely tidy, prompt and unembarrassed answers about money, and an instructor who invests in their own continuing education.

Affiliation with a professional association is one signal among several. It means the school has committed itself to standards it did not write alone and is engaged with the profession beyond its own four walls.

Questions worth asking outright

  • How long have you been at this location, and how long has the head instructor taught here?
  • What are the qualifications of the person who will actually teach my child — not the school owner, the person on the floor at 4:30 on a Wednesday?
  • How many students are enrolled, and how many are advanced belts?
  • What is your policy on injuries, and who is trained in first aid?
  • May I speak to a parent whose child has been here more than two years?

Trust the answer you get to “may I watch?” more than anything printed on a brochure. Schools worth joining are comfortable being observed.

About NAPMA

The National Association of Professional Martial Artists has served martial arts school owners since 1993. It maintains professional standards, continuing education and instructor development for the profession, publishes Martial Arts Professional, and administers the Lifetime Achievement Award. NAPMA does not operate schools and does not rate or recommend individual schools; it sets out what a professional one should be able to demonstrate, so that parents and students can ask better questions.

The Safe Training Environment Initiative · About NAPMA

Want to Grow Your Martial Arts School? Start With the Standards

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Most schools that stall are not short of effort. They are short of structure — a written way of doing the four or five things that decide whether students arrive, stay and progress. That is what a professional association is for.

The National Association of Professional Martial Artists has worked with school owners since 1993, through every version of this business: storefront schools and strip-mall schools, traditional academies and Brazilian jiu-jitsu academies and MMA gyms, single locations and multi-school operators. The pattern does not change much. Schools grow when the ordinary things are done the same way every week, and stall when they depend on the owner remembering.

The four numbers that decide the size of a school

  • How many enquiries turn into a booked intro. The cheapest growth available to most schools is answering the phone better. Those enquiries have already been paid for.
  • How many intros enroll. The same marketing spend produces a completely different school at a 30% conversion rate and at 70%.
  • What each student pays. Average ticket across all programmes — not base tuition, which is the number most owners quote and the one that flatters them.
  • How long students stay. One or two percentage points of monthly attrition compounds into an entirely different business over three years. A school losing 5% a month replaces its whole roster in under two.

Nothing else moves a school as much as these four, and all four are systems rather than talents.

What NAPMA provides

  • Professional standards, including the Safe Training Environment Standard for instructor screening, supervision, boundaries and reporting — the part of running a children’s programme where getting it wrong ends a school.
  • Continuing education for instructors, not only for owners: class design, teaching students with ADHD and autism, conflict resolution, injury prevention.
  • The trade journal. Martial Arts Professional, published since 1996, reporting on pricing, enrollment, retention and staffing with named operators and real numbers.
  • The professional record. The Lifetime Achievement Award and the association’s industry history — the profession’s memory of how it was built.
  • The school directory, and the network of owners that comes with it.

Start with the safety standard, whatever else you do

If you take one thing from the association and ignore the rest, take the safeguarding work. Every school teaching children carries a risk that no amount of growth compensates for, and most schools have never written down who may be alone with a child, who is screened, or what happens when a parent raises a concern. The school owner checklist is free to read and takes an afternoon to work through.

the association enquiries go through NAPMA NAPMA or on (720) 256-0208. A representative will tell you what the association currently includes and what it costs before anything is set up.

A note on coaching. NAPMA the association is an association the association, not a coaching programme. One-to-one business coaching, diagnostics and mastermind groups are provided separately by Martial Arts Wealth Mastery, a separate company founded by Grand Master Stephen Oliver, who is also NAPMA’s CEO and Chairman. NAPMA’s earlier coaching tiers — Maximum Impact, Peak Performers and the Inner Circle mastermind — have been retired.

© Martial Arts Professional, Inc. DBA National Association of Professional Martial Artists (NAPMA). All rights reserved.