Singaporean influencer, actor and entrepreneur Kelvin Tan, better known by his moniker Mayiduo, has shared how he went from experiencing pain in his foot after attempting a pull-up to being diagnosed with severe gout.
In a video posted on social media on April 23, he said he was picking up his five-year-old son from pre-school one day when he saw a fitness corner nearby.
“So, I thought: Can I still do (a) pull-up with my current weight?”
The 33-year-old, who also has a one-year-old daughter with his content creator wife Angie Teo, then demonstrated one on the spot after his son said he did not know what a pull-up was.
“I jumped up, (did the pull-up) and let go,” Tan said in the video. “I landed and my foot felt a little bit weird.”
He added that he felt fine after returning home that day. But the next day, he noticed his foot was slightly swollen and he began limping.
“I couldn’t walk at all by the third day,” he said. “It hurt so much that I couldn’t sleep at night.”
Suspecting it could be a fracture or gout, given his history of the inflammatory condition, he went to the hospital for an examination.
An initial X-ray revealed no fracture, but following the doctor’s recommendation, he underwent a magnetic resonance imaging scan, which showed a torn ligament.
When the doctor pressed on the area, Tan found it was painless, leading the doctor to suspect that it was an old injury.
The root cause of the pain eventually turned out to be severe gout. Only then did Tan realise that gout can be triggered by trauma to the foot.
In the video, he also reminded everyone to buy health insurance, as his hospital stay – which he joked was a “staycation” – cost more than S$4,000, but was covered by insurance.
He updated that the swelling in his foot had subsided after injections and medication, and he has returned home.
“Reminder: If you are overweight, don’t geh kiang and do a pull-up,” he advised at the end of the video, using the Singlish term for over-estimating one’s capability.
Tan set up media company Double Up with content creator Charlene Huang in 2019 and founded interior design studio SG Interior KJ in 2020. He has over 104,000 followers on Instagram and more than 114,000 followers on Facebook.
He made his directorial debut with local comedy Follow Aunty La (2025), which he also acted in, and recently starred in romantic comedy 3 Good Guys (2026) and horror movie Kong Tao (2026). - The Straits Times/Asia News Network
