Kelsey Higginson explains how cold-pressed beetroot juice dilates blood vessels to deliver more oxygen to muscles, giving endurance athletes a 2-3% performance boost. The effect works for distance running and other conditioning-heavy sports, but only if you already have your nutrition, hydration, sleep, and training dialed in.
What about beetroot juice for athletes?
I personally love beetroot juice for any of my athletes who need any form of endurance, and here's why. First, this is about as natural of a supplement as you can get. It comes from a plant that's grown in the ground, and you just get the cold-pressed squeezed beetroot juice. It's just like drinking OJ, but it's beetroot juice. And secondly, I love it because all of our bodies have blood vessels. Those blood vessels carry blood to your muscles and to other parts of your body, and it keeps you alive. When you drink beetroot juice, it takes these teeny little blood vessels and it opens them up just a little bit. The bigger the blood vessel, the more blood can flow through at once, which means it can carry more oxygen to an athlete's muscles at once, which means it improves endurance. So that's a very simple and easy hack to improve endurance, assuming that you have your food and your hydration and your sleep and your training locked in. That can be an extra 2 to 3% gain that an endurance athlete, let's say a 1,600-meter runner, can have and see marginal gains with. But those marginal gains can actually make a big difference.
Is there any place for other sports that aren't like running track sports to use it?
For sure. I would say basketball, soccer, football. Again, really any sport that requires good endurance and good conditioning, it can be very beneficial for.
