How Did a 75-Year-Old Vegan Weightlifter Become Virat Kohli's Fitness Inspiration?

Who is Tripat Singh, and why are Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma talking about him?

Because the cricketer and the actor shared clips of him lifting weights on his terrace and called him “inspirational and motivational” — for doing it, they noted, on a vegan diet. Those Instagram shares, covered by outlets including The Indian Express and SikhNet, are what turned Tripat Singh from a regional fitness personality into a name people search alongside Kohli’s.

How did a man in his seventies end up doing terrace workouts that athletes notice?

According to an interview Singh gave Humans of Bombay (as reported by Republic World), his fitness journey began out of grief, not ambition. After his wife Manjeet died in 1999, he went through a period of depression. Weight training became the thing that pulled him out of it, and he kept at it — building, over the following years, a routine that now includes free weights, pull-ups, and burpee push-ups.

What does his diet actually look like?

When Indianexpress.com reached out to Singh directly for its profile, he told the outlet he had adopted a vegan diet roughly two years before that piece was published. That’s the detail Kohli and Sharma zeroed in on: a septuagenarian lifting seriously without animal protein.

How big has his following gotten?

Singh’s Instagram, @_tripat_singh, has grown considerably — from roughly 71,000 followers around 2020–2021 to reportedly over a million by 2025, per coverage tracking his rise. The Bridge’s profile and other outlets have followed that growth as his workout clips kept circulating.

So how old is he, exactly?

Here’s where the record gets messy, and it’s worth being honest about it rather than picking a number. The Indian Express headline that prompted the Kohli/Sharma coverage put him at 75. The Bridge and Republic World both reported him as 76. Depending on which profile you read and when it ran, his age has been stated differently — a reminder that with self-reported birthdates and years of recirculated coverage, the exact number shifts depending on the source and the year it was published. What’s consistent across all of them is the decade: Singh is in his seventies, and has been lifting for more than a decade since starting in his sixties.

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