Bikini pro Jessica Nicole Dolias is celebrating her victory at the 2023 Southern Muscle Pro Bikini Division Show. Dolias shared a video of herself competing in a swimsuit, showing off the physique which led her to qualify for a spot on the Olympia roster. “When you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe, that’s when you’ll be successful. 🐺 ⭕️,” she captioned the inspiring post. “Yesss queen! So proud of you! Congratulations,” a friend commented. Dolias works incredibly hard to get her strong physique—here’s exactly how she does it.
1. Visualization Techniques
Dolias uses visualization techniques to prepare for competitions. "I get very much into my zone before I get on stage," she says. "Well, before I'm lined up. I get super quiet and just kind of sit in myself and visualize myself on stage. I'm really big on visualization, so I just imagine myself doing my routine, imagine what I'm going to do. So I get into this little quiet kind of bubble and then when I get lined up, I like to kind of perk myself up and just talk to everybody around me and just get a laugh going and get conversation going to just kind of really brighten up the mood and just get myself excited to get on stage. So I go from I guess one extreme to the other before I step on that stage."
2. Holistic Nutrition
Dolias follows a holistic diet, with a focus on food that gives her energy and makes her feel good. “To me, holistic just means eating foods that make you feel better and incorporating a lot of foods that are so full of nutrients and full of life and make your life better,” she says. “That's what holistic means to me, and why I got my certification from American Fitness Practitioners & Associates, through all of their textbooks and everything they teach just following a diet that makes you feel whole. It's not about cutting things out of your diet or anything like that, but it's just about including things that make you feel better, make you feel healthy, and so that's really more what holistic means to me.”
3. Good Habits For Life
Dolias focuses on the importance of healthy habits for a happy life. “Through myself, through my girls who I coach, you just realize how invigorating it is to eat well and fuel yourself well,” she says. “And even with fitness, just looking at it as an overall picture, when you take control of your fitness and your nutrition, your life really changes. So being able to see that as a coach, and even in my own life, you see how important those habits that you build, it just really sets up your entire life, your nutrition, what you fuel yourself with, really it impacts everything. It impacts your energy, it impacts your mood, it impacts your decision making. Honestly, it's amazing how much of an effect it has on your life.”
4. Healthy Relationship With Food
Dolias has learned to truly appreciate food as something to be enjoyed rather than restricted and obsessed over. "I love studying nutrition and how much it really affects your body and how much it impacts your health," she says. "When I look at foods, I just look at what's going to help me in where I want to go. Even with training, I'm like, all right, what foods make me feel good? What foods do I know are going to help me build a physique I want? What foods do I enjoy? And just the combination of that. It's amazing how powerful the mind is when you can just let it change like that. And I guess that's kind of the difference, if that makes sense, between when I was going through then and now you can’t see food as anything to control you, or anything that has to do with anything other than giving you a life to do what you need to do.”
5. Lifting Heavy Weights
Dolias has focused on lifting heavy weights and getting enough food to build strength. “I've just been working on going a lot heavier,” she says. “I do a lot more old school training nowadays. I do a lot more squats. I've really worked on improving my squat form that's made a big difference in helping me build up my legs. I make sure that I eat enough. I've been able to get my food up a whole lot over, especially this past, especially this past improvement season… we have to eat to grow. So just bringing my overall volume up has helped me a lot and doing a lot of just heavy compound lifts like deadlifts, squats, presses, different things like that have really been good for me. But I do a lot more higher weight load, but higher reps has been a good response for my body.”