What I Wish I'd Known Before My First Bodybuilding Show
I'll be honest — my first show wasn't what I imagined it would be.
Not because I didn't work hard. I did. But I went into it with a head full of stress, a pair of second hand heels that were the wrong size and completely wrong style for me, and absolutely no idea what was coming on the other side of show day. I also thought it would be a great idea to wax during peak week (when I had never waxed before) safe to say that was a DISASTER.
And it was all of that — every mistake, every thing I wish I'd known, every moment of "why did nobody tell me this" — that eventually became the foundation of KOMPAK. So in a strange way, I'm grateful for it. But I'd still go back and tell myself a few things if I could.
You are never going to be perfect — and that's okay
This is the one I wish someone had sat me down and said clearly before my first show.
You will always have something to work on. Your conditioning, your posing, your package — there will always be something that could be better. That never goes away, no matter how many shows you do. And the sooner you make peace with that, the better your experience of this sport becomes.
Chasing perfection doesn't just take energy — it takes enjoyment. And a stressed mind very often translates into a stressed physique. If you're wound up in your head about every little thing, it will show. Not just in how you feel backstage, but in how you present on stage.
You don't have to be perfect. You just have to be your best on that day.
And something else worth understanding early — at your first show, you will only be able to bring so much condition to the stage. That's just the reality of where you are in your journey. It's not a reflection of how hard you worked or how much you wanted it. It takes time to build the kind of package that consistently places well, and your first show is part of that process. Understanding that going in — really understanding it, not just nodding along to it — takes so much unnecessary pressure off and lets you actually enjoy the experience for what it is.
And how you place at your first show, or your second, or even your third, does not define the rest of your journey as an athlete. I didn't place for my first two seasons. Two full seasons. And I'm still here, KOMPAK exists, and those early experiences shaped everything that came after. Placing is not the measure of whether you belong on that stage. Showing up is.
Overthinking is the biggest killer — especially about your first show
Stop overthinking which show should be your first. Stop overthinking which federation. Stop overthinking whether you're ready.
My advice? Try as many federations as you can when you're starting out. They all have a different feel, a different judging criteria, a different atmosphere. You won't know what suits you until you've experienced a few. And the only way to do that is to just get on a stage and start.
The competitors who progress fastest are rarely the ones who waited until everything felt perfect. They're the ones who got started, made mistakes, learned from them, and came back better.
Cutting corners will most likely cost you way more in the long run
I bought second hand strapless heels for my first show. They were a size 7. I'm a size 8. And I genuinely cannot wear strapless heels to save my life.
I bought them because I was trying to save money. And what actually happened was that I couldn't pose properly in them, I didn't progress as fast as I should have, and I ended up having to buy the right heels anyway. I just did it the long way round and lost time in the process.
Invest properly in the things that matter from the start. Your heels, your suit, your coaching — these aren't areas to cut corners. The money you think you're saving almost always costs you more further down the line, either financially or in the quality of your experience on stage.
Nothing is ever worth reacting to
Prep brain is real. When you've been dieting for weeks, when you're tired and depleted and emotionally invested in every single detail, it becomes very easy to let your emotions take over. To react to everything. To turn a minor inconvenience into a crisis.
I did it. Most competitors do at some point.
But here's what I know now — reacting to everything in a stressed, heightened way never once made anything better. It just made everything harder. And 99% of the time, whatever you're reacting to has a solution. It's rarely the end of the world, even when it feels like it is in the moment.
Save that energy. You'll need it for the stage.
Nobody prepares you for what comes after
This is probably the biggest one.
Everyone focuses on prep, on show day, on the stage. Nobody really talks about what happens after. And if your post show experience hits you hard — the exhaustion, the emotional crash, the loss of structure — it can feel completely out of nowhere.
It happened to me. And I wasn't prepared for it at all.
If you want to understand what post show actually involves — and have real strategies to navigate it rather than just hoping for the best — the KOMPAK Post Show E-Book was written exactly for that. It came from my own experience of going through the hard version and realising there was nothing out there that actually helped.
One last thing
Your first show is supposed to be hard and imperfect and overwhelming and brilliant all at the same time. Don't put so much pressure on it that you can't enjoy it.
And if you have questions before you get there — about your heels, your jewellery, your kit, any of it — you know where we are.
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