Most people know me from the mountains — the photos on the ice, the flag at Everest Base Camp. But there is a second life that happens every single week, far from any Himalaya: in a chalk-dusted gym in Ahmedabad, under a loaded barbell.
People call me “Gujarat's Strongest Girl,” and that name didn't come from the climbing. It came from numbers — an 85 kg squat, a 105 kg deadlift, six state gold medals — built one ordinary training day at a time. So let me take you inside what an actual week looks like.
Why a mountaineer lifts
This is the question I get most: a climber, in a powerlifting gym? But for me the two were never separate. The mountains taught me that the body is something you build before you need it — the way papa trained me for months before a single trek.
Strength training is the same idea, just measurable. Carrying yourself up to 20,000 feet at Kang Yatse takes legs, a strong back, a calm core. The barbell is simply where I build those, where progress is honest and written in kilograms.
Inside the training week
A powerlifting week is not endless random workouts. It is a few big lifts, repeated and slowly loaded heavier. Mine is built around the same movements that get tested on the platform:
- Squat day. The lift that builds everything — legs, hips, back, and the mindset of getting under a heavy bar and standing back up. My best is 85 kg.
- Deadlift day. My favourite, and my strongest number: 105 kg off the floor. Nothing teaches full-body strength like picking heavy weight up and putting it down with control.
- Olympic lifts. Snatch and clean & jerk — 40 kg and 55 kg — the fast, technical lifts. These are where powerlifting meets weightlifting, and where I want to grow most.
- Recovery is training too. Sleep, food, rest days. A bar doesn't get lighter because you want it to — it gets lighter because you recovered well enough to come back stronger.
The discipline nobody films
The reels show the heavy lifts and the medals. What they don't show is the boring part — the warm-up sets I have done a thousand times, the days a weight feels heavier than last week, the showing up when I would rather not. That part is the same on the mountain and in the gym, and it is the part that actually matters.
I am fourteen. The numbers will keep going up for years. But they only go up because of the days that look like nothing — same gym, same bar, one more rep.
Where this is going
Powerlifting gave me my name, but my long goal is bigger: Olympic-style weightlifting, the snatch and the clean & jerk, on the biggest stage there is. The mountains and the platform are not two different stories about me. They are one story — about a girl from Ahmedabad who decided early that strength is something you go out and build.