Master Michael Ayerst

5th degree Black Belt and School Owner

Master Michael Ayerst started training in Choi Kwang Do when his then 3 year old saw a martial arts instructor at the Novi LifeTime Fitness and said ”I want to do that”. So he enrolled her in the Little Dragons program with Sabumnim Erin Austin. After a week or so he signed himself up for the Adult program.

The program was very beneficial on many levels to the Ayerst family and most of all to Michael himself. Being a stay-at-home dad at the time, he was seeking structure and discipline; he had also suffered a knee injury in college that made him believe he would never again be able to do athletics at any level. He quickly found that the biomechanics and yoga-based stretching of Choi helped his knees get stronger as well as his whole body. He started Choi Kwang Do in April of 2002 at 280 pounds and within 1 year lost almost 40 pounds by doing nothing more than training twice a week. Over the years of training he started to take his health and well-being more seriously, learning more about nutrition as well as why and what he should eat.

In October of 2005 he went to Argentina for an International Choi Kwang Do Seminar where he found that Choi was more than just an art but also found it to be a world wide family, meeting students and instructors from all over the world he calls friends to this day. One of the seminar’s clinics shared information on being a school owner in CKD (Choi Kwang Do). Upon returning home to Michigan he started to look for opportunities to teach CKD in his own school.

On January 2nd of 2006 he started teaching Adult classes at LifeTime Fitness of Canton, at first, there were no students, but by day five he had four, and it continued to grow from there. After about 2 years his instructor, Master Erin Austin (having earned her 5th Degree Black Belt) asked if he would be interested in purchasing her commercial school in Novi. So on April 1st 2008, together with his wife Laura, he purchased the Novi Academy and named it Ayerst Choi Kwang Do.

All of the Ayerst Family (Michael & Laura’s children) have since earned their own black belts: Marisa & Sean, their two older children, became 3rd Degree Black Belts as well as Assistant Instructors, and James and Michaela have both become 1st Degree Black Belts. After Laura earned her 1st Degree Black Belt she also became qualified as an Assistant Instructor, and Michaela is currently training to become an Assistant Instructor as well.

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