Athletes have long been experimenting with
different methods and supplements to boost their performance.
A popular yet unspoken supplement comes from an unlikely root vegetable.
Beetroot.
The juice from beets are packed with nitrates that some scientists
and nutritionists believe could help an athlete win their next competition.
Can beetroot juice be described as the latest natural performance enhancer?
Brian Megans is a semi-pro cyclist, living in the Netherlands.
He believes that beetroot juice supplementation
helps boost his acceleration in time trial races,
and he sells fresh beet juice at the coffee shops he co-owns with his wife.
Beetroot juice is definitely not a miracle juice.
However, I'm convinced that it does help a little bit in sport performance
and I think a lot of athletes that already give their max, they train max,
they do everything to make sure the performance is as good.
Why not take a supplement
that helps them even if it's just a little bit with it?
And I think that's why it's used by a lot of pro athletes.
Experts Kristin Jonvik and Doctor Samefko Ludidi
explain the scientific research behind the power of the beetroot.
Can simply drinking a beetroot shot
mean that our bodies will work more effectively?
Beetroot juice supplementation is not really that old.
It all started in 2012 when Mo Farah won two golds at the Olympics in London
and also said that he used beetroot juice in that period.
And a lot of people were curious to see
whether beetroot juice could be something to enhance performance.
So there's two sides of the story.
On the one hand, there is what works for the individual athlete
and on the other hand there is what works from a scientific point of view.
So my personal opinion about beetroot juice is that I think
it's a potential natural performance enhancer.
I believe that it helps. That's why I use it.
The way I use beetroot juice is a week before really important races,
I take one dose every day and then on the race day I take one
in the morning and I take one two hours before the race.
That's when the juice and the athlete come together and it should do the job.
Beetroot juice or nitrates will help you get
more blood flow to the place where it's needed
because it opens your blood vessels and in high intensities,
you're usually in a state where oxygen really is the limiting factor.
So you would like oxygen to come fast towards the working muscle.
Which means that in the end, you could run
a further distance within the same amount of time.
Nutritionists now often consider nitrate levels
when producing training plans for athletes and sports teams.
Studies have shown an improvement in efficiency
in our muscles and blood when drinking beetroot juice.
But do these benefits vary depending on the type of athlete?
We did several studies, looking into different type of athletes
and whether they can benefit from this beetroot juice supplementation.
We did it for the Olympic Sprint track cycling selection
and national talent cyclists,
and we did it for a recreational group of people that cycle sometimes.
And all of them did repeated sprint tests.
Go! Come on, come on, come on.
The athletes did a 30-seconds all-out sprint and then four minutes of recovery
and then they had to go again three times.
Extremely exhausting and definitely an activity
where they're completely out of breath and oxygen.
We saw small effects in this particular study.
We did not see any effect on the mean of the power output
or the maximum level of power outputs on the bike.
But we did see that they accelerated faster.
They reached the peak power output faster,
and that also holds for all three different ethnic levels.
Whilst the immediate effects of beetroot juice
and acceleration and high intensity sports are clear,
some researchers suggest that beet juice may not be as effective
in elite athletes in some endurance sports.
Now it becomes very interesting. So what could explain that
the beetroot juice works in some cases and it doesn't seem to work in other cases.
When you're investigating elite athletes,
it will always be challenging to get enough subjects for participation
because elite is per definition scarce.
So there aren't that many studies on elite athletes
when it comes to beetroot juice supplementation.
And in particular, one study showed that it was less effective
in endurance-trained elite athletes.
Therefore, it has been suggested that elite athletes might not benefit
from nitrates supplementation. So we were curious to see
whether elite athletes of short, high intensity disciplines could benefit.
Interestingly, in this study, we saw
that there might be something to beetroot juice
when the intensity is high enough
and when you really have oxygen as the limiting factor.
For recreational athletes,
you will quite often be out of breath.
So there is a much larger potential for nitrate supplementation to work.
That doesn't mean that the elite athlete cannot benefit,
but the conditions really need to be extreme enough for you to see an effect.
However, it's also potentially the difference
between winning and not even reaching the podium.
Especially in cycling, it's often the very tiny differences that matter.
It can be a matter of seconds or even milliseconds.
That's why a lot of cyclists are looking for marginal gains that can be
in aerodynamics, that can be in supplements, that can be in training,
because all those marginal gains added up do make a difference.
The sports community is starting to advocate for the use of beetroot.
Could it be the key to making us stronger and faster?
A lot of people are looking for holy grails,
miracle juices, miracle pills, etc.
But they don't exist. Let's start with that.
If you look at health and if you look at performance, there is this pyramid,
and that's the basis, rest, rhythm, food, and exercise.
And on top are the extra things one could do to increase performance,
increase health. But that's useless if
the basis of the pyramid doesn't work.
Get your food on point, get your activity in, and get sufficient rest.
And only then it's worth looking at the top, at the performance enhancers.
Intermittent fasting, beetroot juice, what else.
In general, I would say that beetroot juice is more effective
the less trained you are.
You have more potential to improve your oxygenation or the blood flow
to your muscles when you haven't trained that much before.
For endurance athletes, elite athletes might not benefit
from nitrate supplementation because they're so well-developed already.
When it comes to the high intensity, there might be something
for all fitness levels that when you are sprinting or really out of breath
or even at altitude or underwater, beetroot juice and nitrates
can be helpful also for a top level athlete.
Following every new study, the hype
around beetroot juice continues to grow in popularity.
You can find energy bars, capsules
and powders that promise to enhance performance.
Enjoying a glass of beetroot juice before our next cycle or workout
may just give us all the extra boost of power that we need.
And if this helps a little bit, then why not?