Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Your weekly movement news roundup. 7th of January, I must say, very complicated news coming from Kazakhstan. We'll get to it in a minute. You're listening to Give the People What They Want. Your weekly movement news roundup brought to you from People's Dispatch. That's Zoe and Prashant, your superb editors. I'm Vijay from Globetrotter. Listen, I started by saying that the news from Kazakhstan is confusing. Yes, there have been enormous protests. Yes, Kasim Tokayev is under immense pressures. Government has resigned. It looks like he's basically taken charge of the state. That is what it feels like. Spoke to somebody who used to live in Kazakhstan, haven't been able to get in touch with people in Kazakhstan, largely because the internet is down and has been down since yesterday. Telephone lines are hard to get into and so on. And I don't know, we don't have good contacts in Kazakhstan. I'm just admitting this to you as a reporter and journalist. Here's what's confusing about it. Looks like this country, the ninth largest, by the way, by area, roughly 19 to 20 million population, one of the world's largest exporters of fuel. In fact, it belongs to OPEC Plus. Used to be part of the Soviet Union, had a close relationship to Russia, still has a very close tie with Russia. This country, if you look at a proper map, it's enormous. This country had just about a year or two, two years, three years ago, in September 2019, had just under 2% of the share of the world's Bitcoin mining. Now, I had to study about this in order to do this segment for the show. I didn't realize the extent at which Bitcoin mines draw from the electricity grid. But because the Chinese government has taken a negative position regarding Bitcoin, lots of Bitcoin miners moved from China to Kazakhstan. And within the space of two years, Bitcoin mining went from just under 2% of the world's Bitcoin located in Kazakhstan to almost 20% of world's Bitcoin located in Kazakhstan. Now, the government in Kazakhstan, as per a global pattern, has seen inflation and has had inflation hit particularly the fuel sector. Quite dramatic rises in fuel prices. Well, here's where the story gets interesting. Some people say that the Bitcoin miners very angry that fuel prices have gone up, which impacts their business model began to egg on a set of protests. That's one theory out there. I can't tell you much more than that. I believe there's a lot of pent up feeling in Kazakhstan. I've done some conversations with people, never been there myself, but done some conversations with people. So it looks like there was a government that took power in 1991, which essentially is unchanged. I mean, Mr. Tukayev is the head of the state, but he really seems to be operating as a proxy for the former head of the government. Now, the issue is pent up demands can go in all kinds of directions. And it looks like these are those kinds of protests. It's disturbing because the protests seem to have taken on a character where it's usually disruptive for people in the middle of the pandemic. Not exactly sure where this is going to go. The government has a very long history of using brute force against any kind of uprising. And we've already seen that. A lot of very forceful repression by the government and so on. They've also shut down the internet, as I said, and they've shut down some of the electricity grids that go to the Bitcoin miners. That's interesting. Is this really the first global Bitcoin revolution? Don't know yet, but we'll have to follow this closely. Neighboring countries, of course, Afghanistan still under immense pressure. Of course, we've seen concern from Russia because, you know, Kazakhstan has got a large border with Russia. Great concern from Russia. Some people, again, talking about that other phrase, color revolution, not sure what that means half the time, but that phrase is in circulation. Come back to you next week when the internet has been resumed in Kazakhstan. Hopefully we'll talk to people there, get a better idea of what's going on. As far as we know now, there's an enormous uprising. The government has had to resign. Emergency powers in the hands of the head of government, Mr. Tokayev, and the police is in full force on the streets. Bitcoin has suffered. 20% of that market has now collapsed. Looks like the United States trying to pick it up, but I doubt that's going to happen. Protests in Kazakhstan, in the heart of Eurasia, in the heart of Central Asia, you draw a direct line down from Almaty down into India. Also protests there, but a completely different kind of protest, Prashant. I gather the Anganwadi workers are back at it. Absolutely, right. This is in the state of Haryana, of course, where I believe close to 20,000 Anganwadi workers are believed to have participated in a protest. The important thing to note is that they have been on strike from last month. Now, these are these are workers who basically are employed in creches, who perform the very important role of taking care of children, provide necessary support, provide the essential aid at a very young age for children. They're actually anchors of the education system and the social welfare system also. Unfortunately, however, despite the very important role they play, they are paid a pittance. Like right now in Haryana, for instance, their salaries for the workers are around 12,000 rupees, which is I believe close to $180 per month. And for the workers, it's around 6,000 rupees, which is not even $100 per month. So this is a salary they get paid for what is obviously a lot of work, what is taxing work. And it's important to note that in 2018, the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, had announced that there would be an increment. And he promised that Anganwadi workers would get an increment. And once again, it's important to note this is not a huge increment. We are talking about 1,500 rupees, which is say around, again, I believe $20. That's for the workers. And for the helpers, it's 750, which is just about $10. So that's basically the increment we're talking about. And this has not been given by the state government. And it's been three years now. The state government has made promise after promise. And the workers have also staged protests making these demands. So what happened on January the 7th was that a couple of days ago, sorry, January the 7th was that there was a big protest, the unions, where the government, the government considered some of the other demands, but did not accept this very fundamental demand of just a very simple and basic increment to the salaries. And now the workers have decided that they are going to take part in a jail burrow, which is a filter jail campaign on the 12th of January, definitely escalating their protests. I think it's very important to note this because the salaries and the increments are not even the maximum of what the unions are demanding. The unions across the country have time every year have protested asking for a minimum wage of 18,000 rupees across sectors. And this is something the government has not been giving, of course, but they're not even giving minor increments. And for every single increment, every single benefit, these workers who play such an important part in the life of Indians across the country have to really struggle. It's your work hard at work and then you need to come out on the streets time and again. And I think this is not only of Anganwadi workers, but what is called the broad category of scheme workers, which is also people who work in the health sector for instance. Many of them do not have permanent jobs despite having, despite again performing this vital function, they're often considered in the case of Asha workers as volunteers or they're considered as non-permanent or contract workers. So even though they provide essential government services, none of them are employed by the government. So I think this is a very important question we need to ask. We need to think of in the context of an Indian government, which has actually been, you know, Indians in the news a lot these days because of the hate that's being promoted. And there seems to be, of course, no action against it.  In fact, the press conference said that people need to take up sticks. So this is the kind of approach that those in power, those are the rolling BJP adopted. And so it's in one way very inspiring to see the kind of protests that have been going on for such a long time. Workers definitely sticking to the demand. It's a very great thing to see these workers who, you know, we know from direct impact with them that they are, as you say, frontline workers. This is part of the global informal sector, you know, greatly disparaged from one end of the planet to the other. Very glad that, of course, they are on strike. And it's very important that we continue to report these stories. You know, friends, one of the things about worker stories, labor stories, strikes in particular, is they take on a tendency of being repetitive. But it's very important to keep on this because these struggles are repetitive. And it's the repetitive nature that builds confidence of people and so on. So this is a story we'll be on.  They were killed just this week. Talking to a rival gang leader killed by gang violence in Haiti. Terrible business. Six months after the president of Haiti had been killed. This is the state of things very difficult. In the middle of all this, of course, there's been an arrest for the murder of the president of Haiti. Zoe, what's the story about the president's murder and this arrest of a Colombian national?   I think last year what was happening in Haiti was brought to light for a lot of people when the president, Jovenin Moyse, was assassinated in July. But really the situation has been a pressing one for several years, of course. I mean, decades, really. But in the past couple of years, you know, the tensions have really come to a fore. You mentioned the assassination of two journalists earlier this week. I mean, the situation of insecurity, of the growth of gang violence in Haiti is extremely concerning. Our colleagues, you know, from the Haitian popular press agency have a really great weekly digest. Encourage people to check that out.  And they've been, you know, reporting about constantly about this increase in gang violence. You know, people are not able to go over about their daily lives because of this. You know, there's a lot of reports that document the deep links between the government and these criminal armed groups. Of course, this phenomenon has greatly increased since the assassination of Jovenin Moyse. In this past week, in addition to, you know, more assassinations, more kidnappings, on January 1st, Independence Day in Haiti, which is, you know, a great day to be celebrated worldwide as a day of the Haitian Revolution. The acting leader of Haiti, Ariel Henry, was visiting Monument outside of Port-au-Prince and he survived assassination attempt. Because, you know, it's at the crux of this rising gang violence, kind of the loss of state control over the security of the country. But also at the same time, Ariel Henry has a mandate that is not accepted by many. And so he, this is the second assassination attempt that he has escaped since he took over as acting leader of Haiti. And I think it's really important that throughout this whole situation, movements in Haiti, civil society organizations, large thoughts of the opposition in Haiti have put forward a plan, a very concrete transitional government plan. They even elected a judge who would serve as, you know, the leader of this transitional government to bring Haiti to a place of more stability, economic stability and more political stability because truly the Haitian people have been fighting for an end to imperialist meddling in their country. I mean, you know, in this, in a later article that we ran about, this assassination attempt suffered by Ariel Henry. There's, you know, a bit there about the core group, which is a group that has been, you know, another de facto leader of Haiti, which is a group of the ambassadors from the U.S., from France, representatives from the United Nations, representatives from the EU who have time and time again meddled in Haitian politics, not put what's best for the Haitian people first. And really the people of Haiti have called for an end to this. They have a plan for transitional government. They're just asking for their sovereignty to be respected. Ariel Henry, you know, of course, assumed after the assassination of Jovenel Mois, there were over 20 Colombian mercenaries arrested in Haiti. Now a Colombian mercenary was arrested by the United States while he was in transit back to Colombia. I mean, it's a very complicated situation.  We also ran a story that's very important to keep in mind within this context, is that the economic situation for the majority of Haitians, the public health situation of the majority of Haitians, is also deteriorating. And so this is not just a question of political power play, but this is a situation of life or death of survival for the Haitian people. It's a very great situation. We're going to be looking at this obviously. Haiti is a real priority for the reporting done at People's Dispatch. People's Dispatch run many stories about this. You're listening to give the people what they want coming to you every week from People's Dispatch and Globetrotter. We have Prashant Zoe and I'm Vijay. Great to be with you. Thanks for all those selfies. Keep them coming. We're going to make some kind of thing with them. Probably a collage of some kind. We need to see you watching our show. It's really fun and we appreciate it. South Africa, as we know, has came out of apartheid, formal apartheid in 1994. The agricultural sector, however, has remained under apartheid conditions. There's a section owned largely by white capitalist farmers, highly mechanized and so on. Then there are small black farmers, most of them really in the subsistence sector. Of course, there are agricultural workers, including those in the dairy sector. People's Dispatch I think had one of the few stories that I was able to read about a struggle that had a dairy concern in South Africa. Prashant, take us to the Clover struggle. Very interesting story. Right. From India to South Africa, another important strike as well. In Clover, of course, the strike has been going on since November 22nd. We have about 5,000 workers on strike. This is actually a very interesting story because I think it tells a lot about how contemporary capitalism works, the road of the state, for instance. How foreign capital comes in. Clover is actually a South African company. It's the oldest and largest dairy company in South Africa. But it is not owned by a South African company. In fact, it's owned by, you can say it's owned by a South African company which is owned by an Israeli bottling company called CBC. CBC and the South African concern, which is Milko SA, took over Clover in 2019. At that point itself, the unions had actually raised a lot of concerns about this and one of the key unions, of course, being Jivusa, that's a general industries worker's union in South Africa and the food and allied workers union. So even in 2019, the workers had raised the concern that the Israeli company, the Israeli bottling company that we're talking about, its presence was very much there in the occupied territories. And so South Africa, considering its glorious history of fighting against apartheid, they were against this merger. But at that point, the tribunal investigating this said that, you know, this is outside of jurisdiction. You know, this is not an issue. We are just concerned about the legalities or the acquisition, et cetera, et cetera, refuse to address it. What has happened now is that in the intervening years, of course, during 2019, when the agreement was signed, what the company gives them assurances, including the fact that a restructuring plan would not be put in place till 2022, which were involved firing a lot of employees. So the firing would not have, should not have started until 2022. And at the same time, the company promised that it would give more jobs than it would retrench. So what has happened right now is that, especially last year, I believe over 1,600 workers have already been fired. Many others have been forced to take voluntary retirement. Salaries have been cut. People have been, you know, the voluntary retirement is often due to the fact that people are given very difficult locations to work out of, for instance, or for the fact that work times have become far more compressed and far more difficult. You know, in terms of even micro aspects, such as sometimes the assistant in the van, for instance, that version has been removed. So what basically we see is that Clover following the footsteps of many global companies like this is bringing its own version of austerity. And now the important thing to note, of course, is that the unions strongly believe that the point of this is to, you know, in fact, shut down the South African, the South African company altogether and open the market for goods from outside, particularly Israel. So that is one of the key points they're trying to make and there is this issue with the government. The government has been non-committal, so to speak. They're not really sort of, you know, really listening to the demands of the workers. One of the interesting aspects is that the workers' demand is that the company not only be nationalized but handed over to workers' control because they very strongly feel that Clover is set out to destroy basically this industry. And an equally important aspect, I think, to note is the fact that this struggle has seen the unions working closely with Palestine solidarity groups. And in fact, I knew tomorrow there's a meeting where, you know, a cross-section of people in South Africa at workers' unions, solidarity groups, activists are gathering to see how to escalate the struggle. And this is actually a very interesting example of how such struggles can be waged across the world because we've seen boycott and divestment and sanctions movements but also the fact that South Africa is often an example of how the strong trade union movement has actually worked very closely together with Palestine solidarity movements to protest, you know, the way Israel is functioned. And we also do know that commerce, for instance, is a very key aspect of how Israel whitewashes atrocities by striking deals with governments across the world, not only for weapons but also, for instance, in the agriculture sector, for instance, countries like India. So the fact that this struggle is being carried out both on the factory floor, on the streets and in coordination with Palestinian groups is I think a very interesting struggle, is a very interesting aspect to the struggle and therefore I think it's one struggle which needs to be really watched because it's not just one concern or a few factories in South Africa but an issue of actually global significance. An issue of global significance. We're talking about the relationship between, you know, apartheid Israel, that's what the UN calls it, and South Africa which, you know, exited apartheid in 1994 and yet in many of the industries there are what one might call apartheid-like conditions. Very good story, important to keep going on. A story of global significance, you said Prashant, I think what could be more significant than the utter political chaos in the United States of America where one year ago we saw some very interesting characters run into the US capital looking like characters from a from a comic-con, you know, show with awfully interesting headdress and so on. Zoe, have any of them been found, I don't know, being taken into a court of law or is it perfectly legal to do that in the United States? Yeah, I mean it's, again it's it was a very historic day and it was hard not to laugh at the ridiculousness of it but at the same time I mean it was such a, I mean, you know, it still seems like such an insane thing that could have happened but if you for one second consider, imagine if that, you know, mob of over 2,000 people who stormed the capital had been, you know, self-identified socialists, had been black, and Latino had been any other thing than, you know, Trump supporters trying to stop the steal. I think we would have seen a very different situation of the capital that would have probably ended quite tragically with extreme militarization, violence, and repression. So that's just one, you know, aspect and it is interesting to kind of take a look back at the one year since this happened. I mean there's so many aspects to bring up.  There has, in a sense, over 700 people have been processed but, you know, as a phrase that we use in People's Dispatch which I don't, again, is one of those that I'm not sure if it's a English phrase or not or something that we may be invented, but the intellectual authors or the masterminds which is clearly Donald Trump who, you know, called people to take the capital to stop the counting of the vote which is how, you know, the context of the storming of the capital was that they were trying to stop the vote certification process because the November elections had been allegedly fraudulent and so it would seem logical that the person who called for the people, you know, to go to the capital to carry out this action, in which there were, there was people who were killed, there were many police officers, for example that were injured. It would seem logical that those who were behind this would be, you know, maybe questioned, would be, you know, given some sort of legal repercussion for their actions. This has not happened. What we're seeing is a lot of low-level people that participated in the action, so there was a lot of combing through, you know, images, videos identifying people who participated, who were at the capital building, who are really following orders who are being prosecuted, so I think that's an important element to point out and, you know, Trump has really pivoted on this moment. He's been able to seize the momentum. You know, we're seeing a very intense moment of polarization within US politics.  It's a moment of division in terms of there's, I mean, we are in a crisis. We're in a deep crisis. There's record levels of COVID cases on the rise. The economy is, you know, suffering because of this because there has not been a strong response to COVID-19. Joe Biden has not been able to really deliver on many of the promises that he made to working people. There's a suspension of the child tax credit, which many people were surviving on, and so this is a really difficult moment, and the right wing has been able to capitalize on this. Just because Donald Trump is not on Twitter does not mean that he's not mobilizing.  This is not going to go away, and I think we need to be vigilant. It's not a joke.  And not only is Donald Trump back in the saddle, but so is Mike Pompeo making a real push already out there, the heir apparent to Donald Trump running already against the Democrats and Joe Biden. We'll see what happens in the midterm elections in the United States later in the year. Lots of good meetings taking place around the world. Important meetings, negotiations to dial down tensions around conflict areas. The first eighth round of discussions between Iran and the various powers around the JCPOA. Some good news here. The Iranians of course, refusing to speak directly with the United States, saying we don't trust you, going through intermediaries, the Russians, the Chinese and so on. This is interesting because now the British, Boris Johnson and the United States have said that, you know, it's hard to trust Iran. The Iranians turn around and say hard to trust us. It was the Trump administration that walked out of the JCPOA. We signed on and we followed all the agreements. So let's not talk about trust. Why I said there's good news is that flying in from Seoul, South Korea is a very important one of the senior most cabinet figures, Cho Jong-Kun, who's coming in to discuss the modality to free up $7 billion of Iranian money that has been sitting in South Korean banks. Now the very fact that Minister Cho is flying from South Korea to Vienna to advance this discussion means that there's been some greenlighting from Washington DC. If this money is freed up, it means that the talks in Vienna around the so-called nuclear program of Iran might actually have more legs than we imagine. Might be. Let's see. First set of talks. Second set of talks happening this coming week in Moscow between the Europeans, the United States and Russia around the question of what the Europeans and the United States are calling a military buildup on the Ukraine-Russia border. But what the Russians are saying is NATO aggression, NATO coming in and absorbing countries that border Russia. This is a serious meeting that's going to be held next week. I'm actually relatively hopeful about the agenda. If you just look at the agenda, seems like they're going to be taking up some of the main issues of the day at this meeting. Let's see what happens. It's a pretty important meeting set to take place in Moscow. Mr. Putin has made noises to suggest that he is fairly confident because what he has done is to actually advance on to the agenda. An agreement that Putin made with Xi Jinping of China a video conversation they had in mid-December where they talked about asking NATO to include Russia's security inside NATO's agenda. It's a very clever move. In a sense, it would be interesting if Russia applied to join NATO. That would be fascinating to take that move. But that's not what they're asking for. They're talking about whether it's possible, whether it's at all possible for Russia's security to be part of the agenda item for NATO. I think this is going to be an interesting point of order. The Biden administration has rejected most of the Russian proposals out of hand. Nonetheless, they are flying to Moscow. That means that they have not rejected the question of talks. What the Biden administration would like to see is the withdrawal of what they claim are troop movements along the Ukraine border. It's to be seen what's going to happen. Talks in Vienna, talks in Moscow. Those talks that Xi Jinping and Mr. Putin held most recently in mid-December of last year, 2021, these talks are key. Gotta pay attention to them. In this last round of talks, they talked about building an alternative. Once again, this has been on the agenda for the BRICS block. Building an alternative to the SWIFT system. Another form of financial infrastructure. It's going to undermine Europe and the United States having a lock hold on global financial transfers. It would be interesting if the Russians and Chinese are able to do this. Okay. You've been listening to give the people what they want. We bring you so many stories. We can't pack it in properly into half an hour. Sorry about that. We can't do an hour for you. It would be exhausting. We do need those selfies. Post them on Twitter. That's where we like to see them. You're listening to give the people what they want. Coming to you from People's Dispatch People's Dispatch.org your favorite movement news site editors Prashant and Zoe. They do terrific work. I'm Vijay from Globetrotter. We'll see you next week. Happy New Year.


I know some people get real antsy after having a baby and because muscle recruitment patterns are so different, starting slow is, is so important because it's not the same body that you had before muscle recruitment patterns and the way that your muscles fire and stabilize and the way that you move had to change to make room for baby and to prepare you for childbirth. I mean, there's hormones and things that are released in the body that loosen up your joints, your transverse abdominis has to stretch and become an atrophy essentially in order to make room.  You walk and move differently. You have a different body. So then you have a baby and you got to go back to the gym and you remember how you'd worked out before maybe, or how you've moved in the past. Forget that. You have a new body and so that's why starting slow is so important. You have to relearn how to move, how to, how to get your body to connect, how to make certain movements feel a particular way. Otherwise you'll overdo it. It'll be inappropriate. And the point that I'm trying to make here with this is that the right training program will get you the fastest results, not the hardest one. Right. Right. So you got to ultimately listen to your body and you're always better off taking it slower and then building, building up to that. Exercise has a profound effect on recovery, strength and well-being postpartum. So, but how you exercise is extremely important. So make sure you make this a priority. You know, uh, this is an important topic, but I want to start with, because I know this episode is about what to do after you have a baby, but I think it's important we talk about going into the pregnancy and train during the pregnancy. Well, that makes a big difference. Yeah, that completely dictates what you can do afterwards. Huge, because a mistake. Well, actually it was first of all, the first mistake that I, I think I, that's common that I would see with that somebody has just got pregnant is, uh, they know that they have, you know, weight gain coming. They know that they're probably down. So then also they want to like start a program or like, go on a cut and like lean out during their pregnancy. Right.  It's, it's at this point, right? So I think, I think it's important that, um, if you like, so I think the advice that I try and give to any, any of my clients that are trying to have a baby is that, you know, while you're trying, that's when you're getting after the training, like building, laying a solid foundation. So that gives us a lot of room and flexibility on what do we do during pregnancy and post pregnancy. It'll really set you up for success. I've trained a lot, a lot of women who've come to me who didn't work out, had a baby and then wanted to hire me. That's actually quite common. If you're a trainer, you'll get women that'll come to you and say, Hey, I just had a baby, you know, three months ago, four months ago, whatever I'd like to get in shape, but then they also had clients that I trained and that got pregnant, you know, while they were my clients and then I trained them during pregnancy and after and the difference in how quickly they recover, how their body respond, like the issues that we are challenged with or whatever, profound with the women who trained before, during and then after versus the ones that just trained after. So that's a big deal. So if you're watching this thinking about having a baby, start now and work out. Now, if you're watching this because you just had a baby, we're going to talk to that as well. Now, first things first, you do need to get clearance first to start an exercise program. So your doctor will tell you when it's safe to start exercising and moving in ways where you're training your body. And this is important because I know some people get real antsy after having a baby. And because muscle recruitment patterns are so different and your body went through such a traumatic, it's just a really big change that you could cause a lot of problems. And I've gotten clients like this where because they went into it too fast, then they'd hire me a year or two later. And it's like, we're having to go backwards to rehab and correct things that, that, you know, problems that they This is a very common one that I've had with clients that have come back and it's, you know, the body needs adequate time to heal even to begin with. So, and I know the urgency is there, especially if, you know, you're fit and active going into it. And it's something that you want to get back to add a lot of clients in that situation. And it's, it's a tough thing to, to really kind of ride it out and wait till your body is, is, is good and healed and ready to go. Would you guys say that, that timeframe is even longer for someone who has not trained leading up? Like, so let's say, say you have two different situations, the client one who is a consistent lifter, lifted through pregnancy, has the baby, obviously took some time off while she was having the baby, right? And then is ready to get back in a training and it is trying to evaluate the recovery time versus the other client who did no training during pregnancy in, but is now motivated after having a baby, say put on weight or doesn't feel good or wants to, likes wants to make an effort to really getting good shape. Now the recovery time that person, in my experience, the first client has a much shorter time that they should, they have to wait before they give you a hundred percent. I'm glad you said this because the doctor won't differentiate. You're right. That's right.  There's also a big, there's also can be a big difference between the kind of labor that you have. Was it a natural kind of like no issues labor or was it long and extended, traumatic? Did something tear or did you have a C-section? All these things play a role in how long it's going to take before you get, you get clearance. Now movement early on is okay and your doctor will tell you this will encourage you to move a little bit, but even that people over do, like I've had clients and friends who they're like, okay, I can't work out, but I'm going to just, I'm going to walk and do stuff around the house and stuff like that. And it really hits them hard. It's like, no, no, no, just, just light movement, light movement, meaning like, you know, very low, slow scroll, getting up to do something very, very easy. Don't overburden your body. And this can take a few weeks or sometimes longer in some people. So light movement is okay, but workouts are very different. And with workouts, you want that clearance. I saw a really dramatic difference with Katrina. A lot of people don't know this, but we, we had lost a second baby right in the, right after the first trimester. And so when she, and so she experienced like this recovery time afterwards, even though she didn't go through full pregnancy and deliver a baby, she actually needed more recovery time from that than she did the first pregnancy because she was so conditioned in the first, she came, she went into max, having max really good shape and training really consistent through it, like literally bounced right back, relatively quick. She was getting back to her strength. And I mean, I think I remember it being about four weeks before she was already kind of hitting the ground, ground running and getting her, her strength back to where she kind of was, which was really remarkable. And then the next time she was not off training, but inconsistent. And then what didn't contain as, as hard going into the pregnancy. So she also, I kept her very moderate during pregnancy because she wasn't training very much going into it. And then so when she had, when after the miscarriage, she ended up having to like really take time off and really go slow.  Back it off. And so it really makes a huge difference on your conditioning going into the pregnancy and what you were able to maintain is where I would start you coming out of. Yeah, we had a similar experience with Courtney coming in the second time around too. It was just a more difficult pregnancy and it was things we had to go through, you know, leading up to a lot of activity levels were way lower second time around. Then also afterwards hormones shifted quite a bit and it changed her entire profile. And so like working back to find homeostasis again and balance took a bit longer to get there. So we had, and it's just one of those things like the first one was misleading because we just thought, oh, it was going to be a great bounce back. It was like almost immediate with her. But this one was like, you know, months and months after that we really had to slowly progress her back. You actually hear, you'll hear people say this all the time. They'll say that no two pregnancies are alike and I think that's, and that's very true. So. Well, and it highlights the point that you made, Sal, that I think is important getting into this conversation is the doctor will normally give you a very generic. They have, they have the number that they tell you. Yeah, they have a generic say, oh, take six to eight weeks off of anything heavy or this weight. So they'll give you a very generic but it, boy, it can be dramatically different. The same woman that went through two different pregnancies may have to approach this, this training routine right now completely based off of what happened. And that's, so your, your example, my example are the, I mean, basically the same situation, same woman, but two different pregnancies and the way they went into probably the pregnancy and then what came out of it made a difference on how they had to start. So it's very important that no matter what advice we give right now and we'll do our best to give the best advice is that you got to ultimately listen to your body and you're always better off taking it slower and then building, building up to that versus the temptation of, I know I can do this or I've done this before. So rushing to get there, you know, because the beauty is set back. Yeah. The beauty is everybody ends up taking a few, at least a few weeks off of training and just taking those few weeks off. It is not going to hurt you. And this is what I try to explain to Katrina because she's just like, starters seem so easy for me. And I'm like, yeah, but actually follow. I promise you, you're going to feel it. You'll get better results because it's more perfect. Yeah. And I remember her after a few of the workouts, she's like, man, you know what? She goes, I was more sore than I thought I was going to be from that thing. And I was like, yeah, it's because you haven't been training. Well, so my experience, you're looking at four to eight weeks for natural childbirth, you know, nothing really big or traumatic, but it can take much longer. And it's, you know, starting slow is so important because it's not the same body that you had before. This is the thing that, and I don't mean this in a bad or good way. Some of the most fit people I've ever trained in my entire life had multiple kids. It's not that it's a bad thing. It's just things changed and moved. And yes, the baby's out, but muscle recruitment patterns and the way that your muscles fire and stabilize and the way that you move had to change to make room for baby and to prepare you for childbirth. I mean, there's hormones and things that are released in the body that loosen up your joints, your transverse abdominis has to stretch and become an atrophy essentially in order to make room.  You walk and move differently. You have a different body. So then you have a baby and you got to go back to the gym and you remember how you did, how you worked out before maybe or how you've moved in the past. Forget that. You have a new body. And so that's why starting slow is so important. You have to relearn essentially how to move, how to get your body to connect, how to make certain movements feel a particular way. Otherwise you'll start to, you'll overdo it. It'll be inappropriate. And the point that I'm trying to make here with this is that the right training program will get you the fastest results, not the hardest one. Right, right. It's the most appropriate one. Yes, the most important one. And there's a difference between what you can do and what you should do. Absolutely. And that's, I can get away with a lot. I don't mean it's the best thing for you. That's right. And that's the thing I kind of had to keep reminding Katrina is when she was going through starter and she fell, I feel like I can do so much more. And it's like, I bet you can. But it's not about what you this is the perfect dose for you. Yeah. I'm like, trust me, I know you. I know what you've been doing. This is more than what you've been doing for the past six weeks. So this is perfect for you right now. And you're going to get results from it just because you know that you can do more doesn't mean it's what you should necessarily do. Right. What's up, everybody? Here's the giveaway for today. So today's episode, we talk about training after you have a baby. We put together a bundle of programs, which is map starter, maps resistance and maps prime. It's called the postpartum bundle. We're going to give that away for free first. So one of you will win that for free, but you got to do this. Leave a comment below the first 24 hours that we drop this episode, subscribe to this channel, turn on notifications, do all those things. And then you'll get the postpartum bundle for free. Now everybody else, that entire bundle is only $99.99. So this is a limited sale. This promotion is not going to go on for very long. Each program normally costs $100 each. So it's like over 300 bucks. But again, right now, the postpartum bundle, which maps starter, maps resistance and maps prime is only $99.99. And you can find it only at mapsbaby.com. All right. Here comes the show. Now, before we get into workout stuff, I think it's important that we address nutrition a little bit. And this is real important because a lot of women will try to do this. Is they'll try to go on a cut after having a baby. Okay, time to lose weight. Now this is more common in women who don't breastfeed because women who breastfeed will notice right away. Ooh, I can't cut my calories too much because I'm not making breast milk. But even then, sometimes I've seen them try to push it. You don't want to go on a cut. You want to nourish and feed your body because what we're going to do with exercise is rebuild your body and rebuilding your body gets your metabolism where you want it and makes the fat loss easier and more sustainable. If we don't rebuild the body and we go straight into a cut, we're going to head to slow metabolism land and you're going to get that, you know, that stubborn 10 to 15 pounds that that sticks to my body after each kid. And now I can't get it off type of deal. So don't try to cut. You're not going to cut for a long time. In fact, my clients that had babies, I wouldn't have them go on a cut, but they would still get leaner because of the building process. Yes. And it wasn't until like eight months, nine months a year later that we would maybe start to cut and they went in such a good position to do so. Yeah, you got to fight the urge to want to look really amazing, you know, again, as soon as possible and think more in alignment of like, I want a strong, stable, supported body that I can build off of from here. So it's it's just fighting that natural urge to just, you know, throttle down from every angle of like lower my calorie intake, you know, do as much high intensity stuff as I can and just, you know, race my way there. Listen, we need to build muscle. We need to build strength and that's going to build your metabolism in order to build, build anything. You need a calorie surplus. Yep. You got to be huge. Yeah, it doesn't have to be a lot, but you've got to feed the body those, those, those things that needs to build that muscle. And if you don't do that, then we're not going to. And like to your point, Sal, we're only going to be putting ourselves in a, in a worse predicament, you know, two, three months. I would get clients like this all the time. I had a baby a year ago. I don't know why I can, you know, it's not working and I'm eating so little and I'm doing all this activity is because of how they, they went into a cut right away. They went hardcore into workouts and it's just you're, you're, you're pushing a big, bolder uphill and it's impossible. So don't go into a cut, feed your body, of course, feed it appropriately. Make sure you eat enough protein, definitely enough fats and carbohydrates as well, but feed your body because we're going to build. All right. The next point is to use a physio ball. This is one of the cases where I love physio ball training. A physio ball is that big ball. You know, some people call it yoga ball or Swiss ball or stability ball. It's those big balls that people will sit on and do exercises. Now I like these because you have to engage your body differently, differently, just to maintain balance to do an exercise like curls or overhead presses or lateral raises or anything else when you're using the ball, it forces you to engage your core and to stabilize. And this is a crucial time to relearn how to connect to the core muscle. So you're going to relearn how to, and here's the difference between working the core and connecting to the core with other movements. You can, sometimes people after pregnancy can try doing sit ups and stuff like that, but the problem is how do I engage my core which no longer is so stretched out while I do all these other activities because throughout your day you're picking things up, you're putting things above in the cabinet and you're moving, you're twisting. The core has to stabilize in order to support all that. Physioball allows you to engage that and stabilize while you do all these other exercises. So it's a very, very important tool for women after having a baby. It's an incredible tool that's got a terrible wrap in the fitness community in the last five to 10 years. Yeah.  Why would you ever do, you know, 90 pound dumbbell circus tricks with it? Or 90 pound dumbbell chest press on the ball, stability ball, like you're trying to build strength, you're trying to lift heavy.  Wrong tool. Yeah, it is exactly. Wrong tool for the wrong situation here, right? Where with a, a client that just had a baby and core stability, TVA activation, understood working on that now takes a precedence over me. Now, now that we don't want to get stronger, that is the goal. And yes, we want to lift more weight and get to that, that place. But we first want to make sure that they have that ability to stabilize your core really, really will activate it and be able to do that. And so incorporating the stability ball and a lot of these basic movements that you would normally do on a flat bench or some sort of a machine, this is where this has, I think, tremendous value and I think it's lost its love. Yeah, it's also, it also slows you down. You know, when you're on a physio ball, you can't do fast choppy movements. You'll fall off the ball. It encourages slow control movement, very important at this time of your life. Yeah, to build strength and to, you're going to need to add load inevitably, but you know, you need to first work on your bracing and bracing the core, the TVA. These are things that were just naturally stretched out through the process of pregnancy and to be able to reconnect and to be able to gain that ability to draw into, to be able to brace and support your spine while under load is essential for you and through the longevity of your fitness career. Yeah, and you know, that kind of brings us to the next point, which is a focus on core connection and how do you focus on that all the time? So you got your workout, you're using your physio ball, that's great. But also you're standing in line at the grocery store, drawing your belly button and do a few reps or tighten, embrace your core when you're, you know, at the kitchen sink or you're, you know, driving, right? Remember to try to connect because the connection has changed or and so for lack of a better term, you've lost connection to some muscles. That's not really quite what's happening, but it's going to feel that way. You're going to notice when you go to draw in, like I can't do that or I can't squeeze those muscles like I used to. So work on core connection quite frequently because once that connection comes online and is, you know, enough to stabilize you with when you're doing other exercises, then you can start to progressively overload, overload. So now I know you didn't put this on this list, but I think it falls right here and that's like breath work stuff. I think that's part of core connection. Right. So I think that's a and this is where like, you know, cold plunge stuff is really cool. I think Justin talks highlights a lot how, how much the Wim Hof breathing method was so powerful for him to work through that while also getting involved in the cold plunge. Cold plunge kind of forces you to work on your breath work. So if you're somebody who's like, I don't understand what do you mean work, I breathe every day and I don't understand what you mean by breathing, working on your breathing. You can test it in the ice bath. Right. And that's one of the things that I love about the ice bath is it forces you to learn how to do that. So if you don't understand what you're trying to do with like box breathing or understand what we're trying to communicate right now, a tool that I think is excellent for that is like a cold plunge. Yeah, I would, I would go cold shower you think postpartum lack of sleep, tired. Oh, cold plunge might be a little too much stress on the body. But a cold shower will do it. And also just, just belly breathing, just full diaphragmatic breathing.  And so what happens is your that diaphragm starts to, it learns to move that way. You got to retrain it to move the way that it's supposed to move when you don't have a baby. So breath work very, very important for that core connection. Next would be to work on mobility but we got to explain mobility really well here because people confuse mobility with range of motion. Yeah. Mobility is range of motion but being able to connect to having access to that. Yeah, like you can connect to it, not just that you're flexible. And the reason why I'm saying that is Elastin, this is some, this is the name of actually a chemical or hormone that's released in the body during pregnancy, that is preparing the body for childbirth and it loosens up the joints. And oftentimes you'll see women who are pregnant, who hurt their, who hurt their tailbone or they feel pelvic pain or they feel hip pain or even post after having the baby. It's because the muscles their joints and everything's loose and they don't have the strength to support it. So it's not because they're, necessarily lifted something heavy, just they're moving these ranges of motion they don't own and they have new ranges of motion because they're a little more flexible than they might have been before. So mobility is moving through ranges of motion and connecting. So this would be like, I'm stretching but I'm not just sitting they're stretching. I'm getting into a stretch and then trying to connect to the muscle that I'm stretching. We have a program called Prime Pro that helps a little bit about with that but really an easy way to do this is go full range of motion and slow with exercises. Mobility is range of motion with strength. Yes. At the end of the day, it's usable. So like, not only do you need to be able to have the ability to get into that degree of angle but you have to be able to, you know, connect, squeeze the muscle and be able to move in that, be able to lift your arm, be able to, you know, hold weight or just maintain tension within that range of motion. So it's more than just the ability to then get into that and relax in that position. It's also to be able to do work in that position. I mean, we obviously, we don't train clients when I want anymore but if I was training a client in this situation, I would actually just prescribe the Prime Pro webinar that I did because I take them through full body. Yeah, that's good. And it's a. It's free. Yeah, it's free. It's at home. They can, they can, or they can literally do it in their living room. I would prescribe that as something like literally, I just want you to do this. That's primeprowebinar.com. Yeah, do this a couple times a week and that will really help address everything we're talking about. And along these lines, when you're doing your exercises, you may want to do like this really deep, you know, you know, squat or whatever, only go down as far as you have control over. And then you can work from there, but always stay connected. That's the key here with the mobility postpartum is to stay connected through full ranges of motion. So like I own this whole range of motion, not like, oh, the stuff far as I can stretch type of deal. That's the difference. Also, nothing fast or ballistic. Now, I don't know if I necessarily need to communicate this a lot because I think you'll figure this out real quick because your pelvic floor muscles, you know, there's there's, you got to strengthen them again, postpartum and doing things faster, ballistic, you know, things can happen. And I've had clients, you know, tell me that, you know, that they, they pee themselves a little bit if they jump or if they run, but it's not just that. Like even if that doesn't happen to you, your pelvic floor muscles are supporting internal organs and stabilizing. And if because of childbirth and because of pregnancy, they're weaker, they're not as connected and fast ballistic movements can become quite dangerous. They can, the risk of injury goes through the roof because those muscles aren't so stable. Well, it's also the, the pinnacle of strength training. It's not even the proper order. If we're talking about this person, we're regressing them all the way back to map starter or trying to get them to understand they need to start to relay this, this foundation. It just, it's the wrong order. Like you would never, any client would never take any client that is decondition or just starting with me and I would let them do anything ballistic or explosive. I mean, that is like at the pinnacle of weight training is that, oh, I've laid a solid foundation with this person after a year, two years plus of training with them. Now we can do some fun explosive ballistic type of movements. I would also include in this too is the things like the orange theory classes and the circuit-based stuff. That's what I'm talking about. Yeah. So high intent. So you may not think that's ballistic, but the, you know, running, sprinting on the treadmills, sprinting on the rowers, yeah, and doing things. They do plyometric jumps, exercises in there, like avoid that and you would see that.  It's fun and stuff like that. This is definitely not, and it's not saying that you can't eventually get to a class like that if you love doing that and it keeps you consistent. This is not the time to do that at all, for sure. Yeah, even slow running. I wouldn't put any, I wouldn't even have people do slow running until stabilization is brought back. Yeah. Because if you can't do something with good stability slow, all that's going to happen when you do that same thing fast is you're going to make it way worse, right? So if you can't stabilize in a lunge and feel really stable and the core is stable the way it should and when you twist or whatever, like running, boy, you're asking for trouble. Well, I mean, that takes us to the next point, which is, I mean, I'm prescribing lots of walking slash hiking. You know, that's what you can do. Like that you want to do some good cardiovascular work and we go for it. And walking is great. Yes. It's something we do very naturally. It's something we still practice daily. You know, we still don't live in like Wally World where we're on these floating devices. So, no, but seriously, we still have the skill of walking for the most part. Yeah, get your vitamin D from the sun, be outside with it. Yeah, there's just a lot of benefits to it. And walk the baby. And walking the baby, yeah, just being active in general. It's just a good practice. And when we say walk, I want to be careful. Don't treat it like a workout. I mean, you can if you want, but really the best results are going to come from frequent, just enjoyable walking because frequency is going to trump over hard and tense, like power walking that you do less frequently. So every day you could do, you know, two, 15 to 20 to 30 minute nice strolls around the neighborhood. And those make a big difference when it comes to health and, you know. I mean, I wouldn't be afraid to go longer if you want. I mean, because it's a walk, right? Sure. I mean, this is something, Katrina and I did this a lot in Max's first six months. She was following like starter and we were doing like this to go out at least twice a day, if not three times a day. Two of them would be short. One would be really long because we'd push him in the stroll until he fell asleep. Yeah, that's great. You know, he'd fall asleep and we'd walk. It was a great time to connect with your partner. That's a time where her and I are communicating. He's sleeping in the stroll or I'm getting my steps in. It's nice. It's easy on our body to be able to do that. So yeah, multiple times a day. To me, that's your form of cardiovascular training for now, you know, before we start to push the body at all. Now, when you are going back to the gym and you are training, you're better off training the full body in a workout than you are doing like one or two body parts. For a few different reasons. One, and this is actually the most important even though it might not sound like it, but the odds of missing a workout first off are high for most people, but really high when you just have a baby. Okay, so if you're scheduling three workouts a week and they're all full body and you miss one, that's okay. You still hit the whole body twice that week.  Like those areas never got touched. For that week. So that's the most important. Second is the body especially postpartum. It really works best if you train the whole thing at the same time. So what we're trying to do besides build muscle and look good and speed up the metabolism is to get the body to move well together and full body workouts.  That's partially what you're training is you're getting the whole body to move together. I mean, I think the best point you're making there is the one that is probably most realistic, which is the fact that you may not have three days every single week. Right. I mean, because there's the other thing that we will always communicate and talk about is like listening to your body and we all know we've been through this with our wives is you know that it's unpredictable. What kind of kid you're going to have? You know, are you going to have the kid that keeps you up all night long and you get horrible sleep all the time and maybe you get a little bit of relief once or twice a week on those days, you are those weeks that might be just a lot of walking and, you know, one day you got to train full body and that's it and you have to learn to work with your body, your schedule, your baby, what's going on and having the flexibility of knowing that hey, if I'm getting a full body workout every single week, I'm at least doing something I'm still moving in the right direction as far as building my body back and strengthening it and then on those good weeks where, you know, he or she actually sleeps for you a little bit. You get two you get two or three workouts in and so I think that is probably the most important point to make with this and understanding that even though you might have a goal of going three times a week learning to be flexible with that base off of your sleep and your feeding and all those other things. Yeah, totally. And then rep ranges people always ask me about rep ranges. I like higher reps postpartum, you know, 12 to 15, maybe even 20 because there's a little bit of strength stamina that we want to focus on that has to do with the stability and also the type of force you need to generate and brace and how we tend to push when we're lifting low reps doesn't lend itself well to pelvic floor muscles that maybe need to strengthen again or cores being unstable. Heavier weight if your form is off you're more likely to hurt yourself with heavier weight than you are with light weight. So I always like to keep the reps around 12 to 15 on average with when I with my clients for at least six months postpartum. Yeah, it's just a better strategy in terms of like being able to have a better gauge on intensity because you can still you know get all the benefits. It's just a different adaptation you're seeking by going more of the high reps route and you know it's great because of the fact that you're not loading a ton of weight as you would with the lower reps and it would kind of expose a lot of instability that you're still working on. Well it's a risk versus reward thing for me. I mean it's a another thing where I'm always going to lean on the you know moving slower and taking less risk right now with this client as we progress through and it's like I know that lifting you in the 10 to 15 rep range we're going to get plenty of benefits and adaptation and strength just from doing that. Sure you can make the case and argue that if we were lifting a 5x5 routine we would build more strength faster but at the at the potential of that person not being able to brace their core properly or their joints being all loose and you know just why would I do that with that client when I know that I'm going to get plenty of benefits by training them 10 to 15 rep range right now and then we can progress later on into a more heavy loaded type of thing. Yeah and you know you know this is interesting too this is I mean Jessica experienced this it's like when she would go to lift heavier in the and she's a trainer right so in the workout good form everything feels good I think it was great and then the day after she's like my hip hurts or my back hurts my shoulder hurts what's going on it's like it's like listen you know your body isn't stabilizing the way it used to so it's hard for you to gauge what feels right with heavier weight it's better to do it with lighter weight and learn how to reconnect build some of that strength stamina which happens at the higher reps and as far as building muscle is concerned there's no difference you're going to build just as much muscle speed of metabolism just like you would with the other rep ranges it's just a better rep range for this particular period right here now this last one has more to do with lifestyle than anything and I found this to be a very effective strategy for my clients when they first had a baby and that is to aim for the short frequent workouts so when you just have a baby now we're talking lifestyle okay you just had a baby like they got to take naps if you're breastfeeding breastfeeding is a big deal so every other couple hours they're on you and it's not like they're on you every two hours they're on you and they breastfeed for a certain period of time it's two hours from when they started so in reality it's like an hour every hour and a half or so you're breastfeeding maybe they don't sleep well you got stuff going on it's like taking a full hour to work out I mean a lot of people can make that happen but that can be very challenging but you can find 15 minutes at a time and in 15 minutes you could do two or three two or three sets of an exercise you string two or three of these together in a day you just did 30 to 45 minutes of working out yeah it's just the more efficient use of your time because of all those interruptions it's like it'd be great if like everything lines up and like you could go for a longer type of a workout but I have to be realistic at this point plus the more frequently you do these smaller workout sessions you know it's one of those things that it solidifies the habit quite a bit more and it's you build momentum with it which is great this is what Katrina calls one of the greatest mom hacks that she has found from us I don't remember what episode where we first talked about this but she says it gave me permission to take the workouts and it didn't matter she says what routine I was following at the time because she still follows these principles today because obviously she's still a mother with a three year old at home right and what she does is she opened our garage is right there as you enter into our kitchen and then the dining and living rooms all right all one big room right and so she keeps the door braced open with a dumbbell and she and Max can be playing with his cars and toys and she'll go do a set and then she comes back and she loves this idea and then if all said he needs a lot more attention getting set up and she has to take a break for a half hour or hour in her workout that's okay this idea that we we've traditionally always taught people like oh they're your hour workout you know because everything talks about it's like you can get the same benefits or more potentially from taking that same exact workout you do in an hour and breaking up over these small micro workouts all day and she that never dawned on her that that was something she could do she assumed that oh because I'm not sweating it's not burning as much it's not as difficult it's worthless am I not getting the same benefits so I'm like no you're getting as good a benefits maybe arguably better benefits because you have these long breaks and feeds and everything in between you might even have more strength as the workout continues to progress and so she's been like oh my god it was just so awesome that I could go oh I'm just gonna go do three sets of squats real quick and then I'm done with that and then I give it back to Max Max for an hour oh then he goes down for a nap now you put 20 minutes together and like so this is how she trains to this day is that these micro workouts and I think that that's such a great mom slash pregnancy type of it's it's massive and you said it all things being equal you don't get worse results you get at least the same results you get when your whole workouts done all together in fact some studies actually suggest and Adam said this you might actually get better results you know Olympic weight lifters in the Soviet Union would use this strategy and would kick everybody's ass I've experimented with this not because I had to but because I want to take my strength to the next level and it's actually quite remarkable it was more inconvenient for me it was actually more convenient for me to take a full hour which is why I don't do it all time but it works out just great so what you could do literally is you could have a physio ball and a pair of dumbbells and you put them there in the corner and if you have 10 minutes boom do three sets of an exercise and then go back to what you were doing oh I got another 15 minutes boom do it maybe two exercises and do some sets and then and throughout the day you add up the time you did a full workout so these frequent workouts because of their how easy they are to inject into your day you tend to work out more and more consistently when you do it this way in fact we have a program called map starter with the physio ball and dumbbells that's all you use so you can literally set it aside and do some of it go back to your day and then oh do some more go back to your day and so on it works phenomenally well look if you like our information head over to mindpumpfree.com and check out some of our guides we have free guides that can help you with almost any health or fitness goal they're all free go check them out you can also find us on social media Justin is on Instagram at Mind Pump Justin Adam is on Instagram at Mind Pump Adam and you can find me on Twitter at Mind Pump Sal this one's really important and that is to phase your training if somebody trains for a full year doing a bench press and they're always aiming for five reps if you compared that person to a person who did bench press where they did three or four weeks of five reps but then they did three or four weeks of 12 reps and then three or four weeks of let's say 15 to 20 reps and then they'll throw in some supersets at the end of that year you're going to see more consistent progress from the person who's moving in and out and less injury that's another thing you'll see less injury as well


What's up everybody, Jason here from jaspyscasebreaks.com. So I broke this mixer here on Sunday Jaspys Nine Box Millville Meteor mixer, baseball mixer on Jaspys case breaks. We had one card guys, the shipping team always A1 catching a card here out of the Tops Chrome Sapphire Technically needs to be randomized guys since it is Minnesota versus Detroit So I'm just gonna quickly randomize this between both of those teams there So let's quickly switch scenes Minnesota Twins versus Detroit Tigers Here you go. Let's roll the dice and we got ourselves a two and a three five times Number one will get this little insert here, of course, and it is a sapphire edition. So it's pretty nice five times one two three four five And looks like it stays with the Tigers actually there you go. So Detroit Tigers, which would actually be Derek Christ So I appreciate you guys just wanted to quickly randomize this and upload this video so you guys can see that Jaspyscasebreaks.com


So hello everyone, thank you all for being here today and especially thank you to the organizers for organizing this amazing conference. So I'm Julia, I work as a data scientist at Etelab and today I will be talking about machine learning on open data sets. So what's Etelab in a word? Etelab is a French public administration that works on many subjects that relate open data and public administrations and public policy. So some of the main missions of Etelab are to promote open data through the platform data.gov.fr which is the open data platform, the French open data platform. Then to support data-driven public policy and finally through the AI lab to exploit open data through data science and AI. So I will be mainly focusing on this today talking about how to exploit open data with machine learning. So first we will quickly see how there is an actual lack of open data in machine learning. We'll try to understand why this is the case and why we should actually be doing using it more in this area. And so in order to tackle this we created the GMMML which is data repository for machine learning using open data from Etelab.gov.fr. And so I will show you the methodology we used in order to create this platform. So how did this journey begin? I actually started working at Etelab while I was finishing my master. So I was following a machine learning course and naturally I wanted to do some applications myself. So I went on data.gov.fr that as I said is managed by Etelab to look for some data sets to perform some machine learning tasks. And I was actually quite surprised by two things. So the first thing was that there are thousands of data sets on the platform, but only a few were actually used for machine learning applications as the ones that you can see on the screen. And also I realized that when you have such a large amount of data sometimes you can get lost and it can be hard to identify data sets that could really be used for machine learning tasks. So we discussed this with my colleague and we realized that this was actually a much larger issue. So we found that in machine learning research, for instance when comparing the performance of different algorithms, most of the time it is always the same small set of data sets that is used. So you can find some of these very famous data sets on the table I put here. And so you can also see that these data sets actually have some pretty good meta features. So for instance they don't have too many missing values. They have a good size most of the time. And so this led us to wonder if these data sets were actually representing the reality and the challenges of open data. So you know sometimes open data can look like this. So this is a table I put as an example from a data set that is in data.gov.fr. So you see there are a lot of missing values. You have some weird data types. So you have code. And also in the second column you have a categorical variable that actually has a lot of categories. So for simplicity I only put a few of them. But you can sometimes have data sets where you have hundreds or even thousands of categories. And this can be pretty hard to handle. So this actually leads us to the first reason why we believe we should be using more open data in machine learning. So the challenges I just showed you could be interesting to challenge machine learning algorithms and also to help evaluate and compare performance on a larger number of data sets. And then since open data covers such a large number of topics we can imagine some quite insightful and interesting applications for education, for research in various areas or for business and eventually to support public policy. But so if open data seems so great and we should definitely use it more in machine learning than why isn't this the case? We identified three main reasons. Maybe there are more that you can share with us. So the first one that is actually important is that there is a lack of data quality. So in open data platforms most of the time anyone can upload a data set. So a data set can come in various types of formats that can be actually challenging to treat. So we would all like to have an ICSV files but sometimes you could have PDF data that are uploaded and many others that can make the task pretty challenging. Also you can have issues with data content. So maybe you have data sets that are too small to be used to be trained in a machine learning algorithm or that may contain too many missing values. So these two reasons actually lead to a need for a lot of pre-processing and this can possibly discourage people from using open data in machine learning applications. Then we also believe that there might be a lack of communication about these platforms. So maybe people are not always aware of the existence of these platforms. And finally, and this is what we decided to work on, there is a lack of catalogs, a lack of data repository that are specifically specialized in machine learning. So what we did was that we had a look at the most famous existing data repositories, mainly UCI machine learning repository and OpenML. And we decided to create our own data repository for machine learning using open data from data.com.fr. So here's the challenge. We had thousands of data sets on data.com.fr and among these thousands we wanted to identify a set of data set that was adequate for machine learning. So naturally the question was how do we select them? How do we identify a data set that is okay for machine learning? So at first we had a very naive approach, I'd say. So you can see it on the left of the diagram. So we manually selected from data.com.fr data sets that were either popular for machine learning or that we knew that content-wise they were okay to be used in a machine learning algorithm. So we took these data sets. With pandas profiling we generated a statistical profile and then we had to look at each one of them. For each one of these statistical profiles we then only kept data sets that would actually make sense when trained and tested in a machine learning algorithm. So for instance data sets that are an adequate size or that had for instance a variable that could be used as a target variable. And then we automatically trained and tested them using the MLjar library. But you know of course this is a very time consuming approach and we wanted to come up with a faster and more efficient way to select these data sets. So we also had an automatic approach that you can see on the right of the diagram. So we took a sample of the data sets that are available on data.com.fr and we filtered them according to the four conditions that you can see on the screen. Mainly on the size of the data sets and also we checked that there were both numerical and categorical variables and that there was a low number of missing values. Then again we did the pandas profiling and thanks to the profiling we identified columns that were difficult to treat. So categorical columns with a lot of categories, highly correlated columns and unsupported columns such as constant columns for instance. And then once again we trained a set of machine learning algorithms sometimes. So why did we choose to train these algorithms? Because we actually wanted to provide users with all the information they could need to perform a machine learning task on their data set. So let me just show you how this platform looks like. So I'll just change the screen I'm sharing. So here's what the website looks like. So on the right you have all the data sets that are available. And on the left you can select some features that you're interested into. So let's imagine for example that you are passionate about data. You want to do some machine learning on open data sets. So for instance you want to do a regression. So this data set seems interesting. It's a data set about cars pollution in France. And you can click on here. By clicking here you will find the data sets on data.gov.fr. But you don't really want to download the data set and check for each column and see what's in each column. So by looking at here you have the data dictionary. So you can check all the variables that are in the data set, their description and the type of each variable. So this can save you a lot of time and help you better understand what you could do with this data set. Then you know one of the things that you might interested into doing when doing a machine learning task but more generally a data science task is to check some of the statistics of your data set. So Pandas Profiling automatically does this for you so you don't have to compute it on your own. You can check some general statistics here. The distribution of each one of your variables. And also you can be interested about correlations. So you can see that there are some interesting ones in these data sets for instance. And also you can check the distribution of missing values. So you are convinced like this data set seems interesting to you. And you would like for instance to do a regression using the CO2 variable as a target variable. So you might wonder should I do a decision tree? Should I detrain just a linear regression? By clicking on the MLjar profile you have an overview of what would be the performance of each one of these algorithms if you trained and tested them on your data set. And for instance you would know that the XGBoost model would be the most performing one. Here you can check the upper parameters that have been used and the metric values, the learning curves and some feature importance. And so this is it. You have a lot of information about your data set that you can leverage to build some interesting machine learning model. And finally you could use some examples that we put here for you. So this is an example of an application that someone did on data.gov.fr And this is a very simple code that we did for you just to have an idea of what you could do with this data set. So I come back to the few slides I want to share with you. So we had a look at the website and as you can imagine we would like to improve our platform. Namely we would like to have more and more quality data sets. So this means that we would like to improve the methods that we use in order to select these data sets. So we would like to improve our filters for instance. And in order to do that we need to understand which are the meta features. So here are some of the meta features of each one of our data sets that you can see. And we would like to understand which of these meta features would most influence the algorithm performance. So the question we want to answer to is what makes a data set a good data set for machine learning. So there are many ways to try to understand that. The first experiment that we did was to do a simple linear regression on the meta features of the data sets that we have until now using the metric value of algorithms as a target variable. So what we found out was that the size of the data set and the number of categories, categorical variables, I'm sorry, were the ones that influenced more the algorithm's performance. So maybe in the future we could use these informations to improve our filters and to better understand when a data set is a good data set, good data set for machine learning. So this leads us to the last, the ideas that we have for the future. So we would like to keep on investigating what makes a data set a good data set for machine learning. This will help us increase the number of data sets we have on the platform. And also, as I told you, we are very interested about testing machine learning applications with open data. So we plan on doing this, for instance, on scikit-learn examples. And finally, we believe that it is very important to create a stronger link with the data.gov.fr community and to encourage people to use these data sets. And ideally we would also like to generalize our methodology to other data platforms. So here are just some key takeaways for you. So we saw there is a lack of open data in machine learning applications and research. And to tackle this, we created the GML. So data.gov.fr machine learning, you can see the link here and you can maybe try some applications yourself. And we'll show you the methodology that we would like also to improve that we used to identify data sets that are adequate for machine learning. So we hope this is a first step to use more open data in machine learning. And I thank you very much for your attention. And I welcome any questions you would like to ask me. Thank you so much, Julia. This is great. We have one question currently. And everyone is welcome to add more questions if you have them. So a question that has been asked is about one of the slides you had, I think slide eight. Someone says they'd love to learn more about your choice of filters and conditions as presented on this slide. Okay. So we tried to choose filters that allowed us to select data sets that could be used to train and test a meaningful algorithm. So this is why, for instance, we removed highly correlated columns or categorical columns with high cardinality because it wouldn't really make sense, for instance, to have columns that are too correlated because it would bias our model. And also for the first filter, it was not actually that easy to define what were the features that make a data set good for these purposes. So we had a look at some results from literature and some others were mostly, I'd say, common sense conditions that we came up with.


A new partnership announced today at Central Lakes College will provide financial assistance to students pursuing a degree in a STEM-related field. AT&T was at CLC today in Brainer to present a large contribution to the Central Lakes College Foundation. The $12,000 donation will be used to fund 24 scholarships to students pursuing a degree in the fields of science, technology, engineering or math that have financial need and represent an underserved population. We know here locally in Crow Wing County there's about 1,400 jobs that are open that have STEM backgrounds and so being able to support Central Lakes College with those types of scholarships it's a great partnership with AT&T and the institution to really help those young people realize their dreams right here in the Brainer community. The mission of the Central Lakes College Foundation is to promote student success by addressing financial barriers to pursuing higher education through scholarships, strong alumni and donor relationships, affordable student housing and other appropriate assistance. Scholarships provided through the foundation really provide that linchpin to to success for some students you know if it can be the difference of being able to make it through another semester or not that can be a big difference to a student and I think especially when we have these specific scholarships for the STEM related field it helps to draw students into that career area where there is a lot of demand for jobs right now. The 24 $500 scholarships will be distributed I should say in the upcoming 2019 spring and fall semesters. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland news please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


Cheryl, this all sounds like a great math problem. What force was applied to a backside hitting the ground? It would be your weight and then, boom, how high you jumped up, from what elevation were you starting all that? Do your kinetic potential energy. It would be this. It would be, let's do a quick little kinetic potential energy. This is the road. This is the ground. Cheryl is walking. I'm sorry. I'm putting you in a skirt. Cheryl is walking this way. I twisted too fast and I didn't want to erase it. Cheryl is walking this way. She goes, whoop, legs kick up and now she's like this. This is, that's her height. Now, potential energy you would have to start off with. Potential energy would be, potential is MGH, I'm pretty sure it's MGH. Rob Luxer, hello, hello. So mass times gravity times the height. So I have no idea how much Cheryl is going to tell us how much she weighs. I don't mind the skirt, but I, in snow, probably just a long, long parka, yeah, for sure. Long parka? Fantastic. Little fluffy goose feathers in here. So they'll pad, pad your bum, right? Okay, that's a lot of forward motion, that's a lot of forward. She was running. She was running. So whatever Cheryl's mass is, let's assume general mass, and you're going to do this in kilograms, the units here, let's write down the units for this. The units for this would be kilograms, we're going to go with SI units. Gravity would be meters per second square, and height would be in meters, okay? So let's assume they jump up one meter, one and a half meter, one and a half meter. So the mass, if we're going to do kilograms, let's take average mass for mail anyway, because I know why mass and kilograms basically, right? So my mass would be 75 kilograms, 75, 80 kilograms, 75, 80 kilograms, right? Let's go 80 kilograms, right? Times gravity, which is 9.8 meters per second square, and the height would be one and a half meters, 1.5 meters. So let's assume that's a 10, we can approximate this. 1.5 times 8 is 120, 120 times 10 is 1,200. 1,200 energy would be joules, energy is joules, not even on this physics for a while, right? 65, 65 kilograms? No, 65 is, what would that be in pounds? 65 kilograms would be 201 pounds. 65 kilograms would be around 160 pounds, I think, right? Yeah. So 1,200 joules, momentum, momentum would be, momentum we can't figure out, we need to figure out the speed first, 143 pounds, wow, wow, wow. You're at 97 kilograms, cool, cool. So 65, what do you call it, kilograms is 143 pounds, shoot, nightbot, nightbot, nightbot says, nightbot says, Rob Luxer, Rob Luxer, nightbot says, Frisage, Frisage, Frisage. Julian Assange is a publisher and journalist that has been crucified for trying to bring transparency and accountability of capitalist power to humanity. For more information, see wikileaks.org, defend.wikileaks.org, or Julian Assange and WikiLeaks playlist on censored too. Now check this out, right now that would be the beginning stages of our system in play, right? So Cheryl would have this much energy in her, right? There would be zero velocity, right? So her kinetic energy, energy, kinetic, energy, kinetic would be zero, okay? Now in physics, what we know, it's okay, oh, they're gone, nice job, in physics, what we know is we have to have conservation of energy, right? So let me erase this. I'll take this a little bit further than this, the potential energy that Cheryl has, right? I'll take it as far as I remember the formulas, right? So at the initial system, initial condition, initial, there's the total energy in the system is going to be energy potential plus energy, energy kinetic, e kinetic, e kinetic. So energy potential for Cheryl would be 1,200 joules, I think joules, man, plus zero, right?  So 1,200 plus zero because she has zero kinetic energy. At the bottom here when Cheryl hits the ground, whap, right? She's going to have zero potential energy, but she's going to hit the ground at a certain speed, right? Just on chat, z, zypho, diddy, love science, always been a passion, always been a passion in this physics. Yeah, physics is amazing, right? The root of it being mathematics, of course, right? So initial condition is this, final condition, kinetic potential energy is zero because she's not at any height, right? Potential energy is mgh, but if her height is zero, this is our zero, the ground, right? Well anything, whatever the mass is, times whatever gravity is, which is 9.8 times zero, it's just zero. So her potential energy is going to be whatever the potential energy, which is zero, and she's going to have a kinetic energy, and kinetic energy, k kinetic, energy kinetic is one-half mv squared, right? Yeah, one-half mv squared, help message. If the radius, this is from our last, yesterday, what is the volume of the bearing of the energy? We definitely have to allow that, links up to our previous thing, right? So one-half mv squared. So we have to figure out what her velocity is going to be, right? And this, right? This has to be zero plus one-half mv squared, right? We don't know what her velocity is going to be, right? We know what her mass is, or what my mass is, 80 kilograms, right? So what's going to happen is, in physics, you've got conservation of energy. Energy initial must equal energy final. So energy initial must equal energy final. Energy initial is 1,200, energy final is one-half mv squared. Now the m, usually, not usually, but sometimes when you do this, you don't plug in the numbers right away. You leave it as a formula because the mass is going to kill the mass, right? On this side. This side is mgh, right?  But let's put it in, right? So this is going to be 1,200 is equal to one-half 80v squared. It goes 40 times divided by 40 divided by 40, zero kills zero, 120 divided by four is 30 v squared. Bring this here. So velocity is going to be squared with 30 meters per second, okay? That's how fast she's going to be hitting the ground, right? What is that in kilometers per hour? Should we do conversion to kilometers per hour so we get a feel for how fast this is? Right? Let's do converted to kilometers per hour, okay? And then we'll figure out the momentum, right? The difference is momentum is mv, right? I'm always calling an ambulance for sure. I'm already calling an ambulance for sure. So square root of 30, right? Let's, here, we'll leave it as square root of 30. So square root of 30 meters per second, okay, hitting the ground. We want to convert this to kilometers per hour just to get a visual of how fast that is. So if you're going to convert anything from meters per second to kilometers per hour, kilometers per hour, right? What you need to do is you've got to get rid of the seconds here. So you put seconds here and seconds is a quick jump to minutes, right? So seconds, we're going to convert to minutes. The conversion rate there is one minute is 60 seconds, but we want hours in the bottom. So hours, we're going to put minutes here, and there's minutes as a direct conversion to hours, so we're going to put hours here. So one hour is 60 minutes, right? So seconds kills seconds, minutes kills minutes. We've got hours in the bottom, which is what we need it, right? And then what we want, we want to convert meters to kilometers because we want kilometers in the top. So what you do is you put meters in the bottom, meters is a direct conversion to kilometers, you put kilometers here, and one kilometer is a thousand meters, right? And this conversion, if you do this multiplication, a square root of 30 times 60 times 60 divided by a thousand will convert it to kilometers per hour.  One zero kills one zero, one zero kills one zero, two goes into this five times, two goes into this three times, three times six is 18. It's going to be here, we'll write it down here. Square root of 30 times 18 divided by five, right? Let's just do this with a calculator. Oh, you're missing the little bit of bottom here. Let me make this five so you see it. Let's make it bigger so you actually see the five, five, right? So let's punch this into a calculator, what do we get? 30 square roots times 18 divided by five. So that's 98.6 divided by five, which is just basically going to be 20, right? So 19.7, okay. So 19.7 kilometers per hour, which is basically 20 kilometers per hour, 20 kilometers per hour. So if you want to get a feel of how hard Cheryl is going to hit the ground, just imagine someone standing and a car driving at 20 kilometers per hour hits them, boom, right? Now 20 kilometers per hour doesn't seem that fast, but when you have a force, solid force hitting you at 20 kilometers per hour where the force doesn't move and you're the only thing that's going to be moving because their weight is infinite compared to yours and the ground's weights is infinite compared to Cheryl's weight, okay? Like coming off a fast bike. Like coming off a fast bike but you're not rolling, right? You wouldn't be rolling, you wouldn't be, what do you call it, slowing down your impact in any way, right? And you're hitting, coming off a fast bike, not hitting the ground but jumping in the air and hitting a solid wall, boom, right? Because everybody's wiped out on a bike. When you wipe out on a bike, you got wiped out. Sometimes you're going really fast but when you wipe out, the ground is on the ground and you can roll and you're not going into a wall, right? Cheryl, I had a bruise that matched the math. I'm not thinking it's time to swap. Yak tracks for full Grand Pond. I have no idea what those are but okay. Pond, we have a formula for how long it takes to clear snow from the highway in the UK. It's roughly Canada's time taken for the same task multiplied by 50 plus traffic delays from school mums crashing their cars, hilarious. And that's because the UK doesn't get as much snow as Canada, right? Not even close. Oh my God, I have come off a fast bike. It's like hitting a wall if you're tossed, yeah, if you're tossed, yeah. But man, hard. As far as the momentum of this, as far as the momentum, momentum is, um, mv, I think, man, I hope I'm right, um, mv, mv, I think so, man, I haven't done this for a while. I'm going to look this up. If someone wants to confirm, please do. Momentum formula, momentum formula, and change in velocity, yeah. So momentum is velocity, mass times change in velocity, right? Joe Chicho, is there a way to convert that into G-Force? Um, yeah, I don't know how to do it. I don't know the formula. G-Force, there was a crash in the recent Formula One season where a driver crashed and experienced 51 G-Force, 51 times the force of gravity? No, it couldn't have been 51. That would crush, that would make him, like a pancake, 51 G-Force, you sure about Joe? Like when fighter jets fly and stuff, I think human beings pass out at 5G or something. Many human beings pass out when they experience, uh, five times the force of gravity, right? He hit the barrier sideways at about 160 miles per hour, 6G, 51 G, no, 51 G-Force is not 6G, is it? Or Ronnie, are you saying people pass out at 6G? I think pass out for fighter jets is 6G. If you know, Joe, if you're comfortable with that, um, with those numbers, we can do a direct ratio comparison. That's all we need to do. So we don't need the formula. We can just do a ratio comparison because we're going to have, um, what do we need? We have Cheryl's speed. So we can convert kilometers per hour to miles per hour and then just do a ratio comparison. Right? Hello on the snake, hey, G-Cho, I've been studying some math lately. I've got a question. Let's say you were riding a motorcycle that goes 200 miles per hour and you were chasing a car that was going 160 miles per hour, you're 1,000 feet, 34 meters away from the car. How many seconds will it take to be parallel to the car? Yeah, we can do this question. Hello on the snake. Bring it up. Uh, now post it again as soon as we finish this discussion and then we can do it. Uh, Ronnie, yeah, I've seen YouTube videos where pilots pass out at 6G, 6G, so cool. 1G is about 22 miles per hour a second, I think. Is it? Is it that low? No. I can't be that low. Is it that low? 1G? I think 51G was a force which people pressed the off button on their TV remote after they stole the championship from Lewis Hamilton. Funny, funny, funny. So if that, I can't be 51G, 51G with the insane first time chat. What are we drawing? We're calculating, uh, how hard someone will hit the ice if they, if they had freezing rain come down. So if they slip and if they're falling from a height of 1.5 meters, 1.5 meters, we calculated how fast they're going to hit the ground, which is going to be 20 kilometers per hour, or equivalent to, uh, the square root of 30 meters per second, okay? So now what we're going to do is figure out what their momentum is going to be, which is going to be 80 kilometer, 80 kilograms times the square root of 30. So 80 times the square root of 30. What is that? 80, 8 times 30 square root. Their momentum is going to be 438. 438. Now what's the units of momentum? Joe, it would have been later lateral G and not vertical G, okay? Which is, uh, what fighter pilots experience, okay? So the G is, is, uh, this way. Not verticals. I wouldn't, wouldn't mean. I don't know. I don't know the terminology on this stuff. What is momentum? Momentum? Units of momentum, uh, force? No, momentum would be, what's, uh, I can't believe this formula doesn't have the units. Come on. Anybody know what the units of momentum are? It was instant as well. Lasted far less than one second. Wow. I just want the word for it. It's not, it's not jewels, is it? No, it can't be jewels. I'm just reading a website right now where, oh, come on, unit. SI unit for wanting, oh, there's no word for it. Kilograms, uh, meters per second. Yeah. We know that. But isn't there a word for it? Kilograms, meters per second, momentum, units. This is so difficult. SI, what is the unit of momentum also called? Kilogram, kilogram meters per second. That's all it's called. There's no word for it. Kilogram meters per second. Okay. Kilogram meters per second. That's what momentum would be, right? Because mass is kilograms, velocity is meters per second. Kilogram meters per second. Yeah. Not a good experience. Sliding on ice, flying up into the air and boom, solid impact into the ground. And if there's stairs here, if this happens to you on stairs, just imagine walking downstairs, walking downstairs, right? And you fly up into the air, come down, and just imagine, because this force is going to be distributed along your whole body if you hit a flap, which is a good thing to do, right? Except the head, protect the head. If you come down and hit one of these ledges, all that force on a little corner,