Get Faster: What the Science Says About Beetroot Juice
As an athlete, you’re always looking for that edge that can help you train harder, perform better, and recover faster. You might have heard about beetroot juice as a performance-enhancing supplement. But does it work, and if so, how? Is there enough science in the area?
Scientific Meta Analysis: here, covering 20 systematic reviews and 180 primary studies
What’s the Secret Sauce? A: Dietary Nitrate
Beetroot juice is rich in dietary nitrate (NO3−); a key player in a physiological pathway that helps your body produce nitric oxide (NO). While your body has another way to make NO, the nitrate-nitrite-NO pathway, fueled by dietary sources like beetroot, accounts for about 80% of your body’s nitrate supply.
Here’s the breakdown of how it works in your body:
- You ingest nitrate (NO3−) from sources like beetroot juice.
- Anaerobic bacteria in your mouth convert some of this nitrate into nitrite.
- This nitrite can then be further reduced to nitric oxide (NO), particularly when conditions become less oxygen-rich, like during intense exercise (hypoxia) or acidosis.
Why is Nitric Oxide Important for Athletes?
Nitric oxide is a potent molecule involved in many processes crucial for exercise performance. It helps with:
- Vasodilation: Relaxing and widening blood vessels, which can improve blood flow.
- Muscle Oxygenation: Ensuring your muscles get enough oxygen.
- Mitochondrial Efficiency: Making the energy powerhouses in your cells work better.
- Muscle Contractile Function: Enhancing how well your muscles contract.
- Reduced Energy Cost: Potentially lowering the energy (ATP) required for muscle force production and sparing your muscle’s immediate energy stores (phosphocreatine) during submaximal efforts.
- Faster Recovery: Increasing the rate at which your phosphocreatine stores are replenished after intense efforts.
- Anaerobic Capacity: Boosting the capacity of your anaerobic glycolytic energy pathway.
- Power Output: Possibly enhancing force production, especially at higher contraction speeds.
These effects collectively contribute to improved exercise capacity and performance.
Does Beetroot Juice (Dietary Nitrate) Improve Performance?
Based on a comprehensive review of the available scientific evidence, the caveat-laden answer is: Yes, for certain types of performance. While the effects are “mixed” across all manner of performance outcomes, there are significant performance-enhancing effects in several key areas.
Here’s where dietary nitrate, like that from beetroot juice, appears to help:
- Time-to-Exhaustion (TTE) Tasks: Nitrate supplementation significantly improved performance in these tasks.
- Total Distance Covered: Nitrate also showed a significant benefit in tasks measured by distance. These open-ended exercise tolerance tasks, like TTE and total distance, appear to benefit because the physiological adaptations from nitrate (improved oxygenation, efficiency) help you sustain effort for longer.
- Muscular Endurance: Measured by repetitions or time until failure, muscular endurance saw significant improvements with nitrate supplementation. These benefits were observed across various supplementation durations and doses tested in the included studies. The mechanisms mentioned earlier, like reduced ATP cost and enhanced blood flow, likely contribute to this.
- Peak Power Output (PPO): This is the maximum power you can generate that is relevant for explosive movements. Nitrate supplementation showed a significant improvement in PPO.
- Time to Peak Power Output: Nitrate supplementation also improved how quickly athletes could reach their peak power. These benefits for power output might be particularly relevant for sports requiring quick, explosive actions like sprinting or jumping.
However, the science is less clear or shows no significant benefit for other metrics:
- Time Trials (TT): Unlike time-to-exhaustion, completing a fixed distance or amount of work in the shortest time (time trials) did not consistently show significant improvements with nitrate supplementation.
- Maximal Oxygen Uptake (VO2max): Nitrate supplementation did not significantly enhance VO2max.
- Muscular Strength: Measures of maximal muscular strength did not consistently show improvement. The effect of nitrate seems more pronounced in sustaining effort (endurance) and potentially rapid force production (power) rather than maximal strength.
- Mean Power Output (MPO): While peak power improved, the average power generated over a high-intensity effort did not consistently show significant benefits.
How to Maximise the Benefits
The meta review offers insights into how to get the most out of dietary nitrate supplementation:
- Dose: For time-to-exhaustion tasks, greater improvements were seen with a minimum of 6 mmol/day (about 372 mg/day) – a minimum of 1x James White (UK) Beet-It 400 Nitrate Shot.
- Duration: For TTE, chronic supplementation (taking it for more than 3 days) yielded greater benefits than a single dose. However, muscular endurance benefits were noted across different durations and doses.
It’s also worth noting that the benefits might be more noticeable for less highly trained individuals than elite athletes. This could be because highly trained athletes might already have optimised certain physiological systems or have higher baseline nitrate levels from training.
Important Considerations
While the evidence for certain performance benefits is compelling, it’s essential to be aware of some points:
Even though there is a good body of science here, quite a few reviews are of lowish quality, and few consider women.
Ensure you buy the right product. Beetroot juice is sold in large bottles with low concentration for general health benefits. That’s probably a good thing, but athletes DO NOT want that; you need the smaller, high-concentration shots.
I have been testing various powdered or tablet forms of beetroot juice. I’m not convinced they work based on N=1. I’ve also seen some sketchy YouTube scientists saying the body does not take up the powders in the same way, and are useless. #YoutubeScience
Tech? – Naturally, there is a tech angle
If you are REALLY into bodynacking for sports performance, then look at NNOXX.
More: NNOXX Review
AFAIK, NNOXX can look at the NO physiology in your muscles as you exercise – it also monitors SmO2, again, that’s fundamentally important to performance. I understand NNOXX won’t help you see the effect of ingesting dietary nitrates.
In Conclusion
Beetroot juice, has demonstrated significant ergogenic effects on time-to-exhaustion tasks, total distance covered, muscular endurance, peak power output, and time to peak power output.
While it may not be a universal performance enhancer for every metric, the evidence supports its use for improving specific aspects of endurance, muscular endurance, and high-intensity power.
Anecdotal Bits
This is all the me-stuff which you can ignore.
- I’m a decent-level age-group triathlete. I am convinced beetroot juice makes me perform better. I can feel the difference – something like 20-30 seconds off a 20-minute 5K to give you an idea.
- I would encourage older family members to look at the non-sports concentrate forms of beetroot juice for general vascular health.
- For me, it takes at least 2 hours to work. I’d say 2.5 to 3 hours. I often set an alarm to get the timing right before returning to sleep.
- I’ve not tested ‘loading’ during the week before a race. There does appear to be some suggested benefits to loading. I have recently started taking one shot the night before a race (in case I get up too late for whatever reason)
- Beet-it have started selling top-up gels. I’ve not tried those yet, but I do have some. If I were doing a Century ride, I would consider adding a shot or two taken an hour or two into the ride.
- After reading the literature, it appears that there is an oral effect on the efficacy that I was previously unaware of. Thus, it probably makes sense to swill it around in your mouth before swallowing to let oral bacteria get to work.
- Diary of a CEO – this guest is a compelling Nitric oxide expert https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zECoaEZRRFU . Beetroot juice seems to be the cure for everything, according to him. The interview format is not challenging.
- Discounts – I get mine directly from James White (UK). I pay for the stuff and I buy £100 at a time. You can get a discount if you purchase those levels (4 cases, £100ish). I can’t publicise the code, but ping me by email, and I can share it (in**@*********er.com)
- I am not aware of any alternative products from the US or the EU. Please feel free to mention in the comments.
More: Beet-it.com (This content is not affiliated or incentivised in any way. It works!)
More: also try curranz, caffeine, beta-alanine, citrulline, and creatine – I’m using DOPE pre-workout powder to get the latter (the DOPE link *IS* affiliated via Amazon). A few more are covered in 5K PB Tips.
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I’ve been doing the Beet juice thing for over 10 years. I think I originally got the idea from the old “Fellrnr” site. I’ve done beet salads each day a few days in advance, and beet juice (multiple brands) the morning of the event. I typically only used it in events that really really matter (like BQ attempts or PRs). The main reason is that I find the taste of beets extreeeeemely offputting. Other than the test, the only other side effect was the alarming color of my blood-red urine after the events.
I actually found in my N=1 example that it helped me at high altitude events like the Pikes Peak Marathon – seems to jive with the findings you listed above in hypoxic environments.
Anymore I use powder (“Force Factor” brand) added to my sport drinks for hard training efforts and save the actual beet juice (“Juice Performer” brand) for my race events.
Taste: the UK one comes mixed with apple juice which helps the taste for sure. I get mine straight form the factory; it DOES taste a bit nicer when fresher. I buy 4 boxes at a time and the last box is consumed months later and def doesn’t tast as ‘good’. definitely more palateable when new
Urine colour: that sometimes happens and sometiems doesn’t happen and i’m not sure why. I would be interested to know. I could specualte but can think of personal counter examples to all my theories!
The powders don’t taste nearly as bad. They also don’t produce the blood-red urine either. My feeling is that they’re not quite as effective.
Isn’t it ironic that for something that tastes as bad as this, it is more effective if you swish around in your mouth before swallowing!
ha ha yes,
as per the video link in the article , i think the powders are not so good too
or get a nice cold press juicer and make your own juice, beetroot and orange is great, and can add ginger as well for a bit of zing. It will be a bit more effort, but will work out a lot cheaper and healthier and likely more beneficial. Those tablets and gels are ultra-processed ‘foods’.
hmm
you would need a lot of beets.
why would you imply the beet juice is ultra processed? there is even an organic version.
as for the tabs and els then maybe you are right. although mixing a concentrated beet juice with apple juice hardly counts as ‘ultr’ although it clearly is processed to some degree. most things are.
I would think that if it comes in a box and has a shelf life measured in months or years then its ultra processed – no matter if it says “organic”, “natural”, “100% pure” on the box. There will be a lot more nutrients in the fresh version.
what extra nutrients would you want that would make it work better?
and then what evidence is there that those other ingredients improve physiology?
is pure frozen orange juice processed? is 100% squeezed orange juice that’s then put into a plastic bottle processed and pure (some people say plastic can leach into liquids)
tfk – I watched that “CEO” video. While he makes some fanciful claims, I find myself curious about increasing the amount of NO and dietary nitrate in my diet. Are you using it only in race prep situations?
yep
he does make fanciful (unusual) claims but his arguments seem decent and he seems to be highly knowledgeable about that field of physiology