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“I went there with the intention to win,” she said. “I came in second last year and missed out by one point, so I changed my training and fine-tuned my weaknesses. Every year, it doesn’t get any easier.”

Liew also reflected how, when she first went to the States in 2010 to watch the Arnold’s, it seemed “impossible” to win anything.

“I was really impressed. How can I ever look at them? I realised I had a lot more work to do… (but) I knew I had to compete there someday,” she said.

‘In my blood’

The love for bodybuilding is “in her blood”, said Liew, who trains up to twice a day, every day except Sunday.

It all began when she was nine and wandered into a gym at her friend’s condominium. After attempting a lat pulldown or two, she took to reading up on fitness and in secondary school came across a female bodybuilder on the cover of Muscle & Fitness magazine.

“I want to be like that” was Liew’s immediate response to herself.

After her GCE ‘O’ levels, she considered starting out in bodybuilding and even based her choice of junior college on the quality of its gym facilities.

Liew became a fitness instructor at Catholic Junior College and it was here that she began training in the gym regularly.

And although she was later accepted into the Faculty of Science at National University of Singapore, she even decided to do a Sports and Wellness Management diploma at Nanyang Polytechnic instead.