How often have you just wanted to just drink something that would let you perform better as a runner that is actually good for you without any side effects? There just might be something just like that. Beetroot juice.
Beetroot juice is very rich in nitrate, your body metabolises this into nitric oxide, which has a potent effect on a number of biological processes, including lowering your blood pressure. It enhances blood vessel dilation, increasing your blood flow capacity and lowering the amount of oxygen your muscles need. That way you’ll be able to use oxygen more efficiently, and this will improve performance and endurance for runners.
Testing if something like that works is tough, I’ve tried drinking beet juice for a while to see if it would help my performance, but it’s honestly very hard to tell, seeing you can’t really tell how different it would have been if you didn’t drink it. But I do feel that I actually benefitted from drinking it.
Luckily they have also done some scientific testing on the juice and it turns out that you consume less oxygen while running and test subjects were able to last an average of 15% longer on their runs.
There is one small ‘but’ to this and that is that studies have also shown that the benefit of the juice is a lot smaller in highly trained athletes. So like with everything, the better trained you are, the harder it is to improve.
The beet juice I drink is ‘Beet it shots’. It is a concentrated beet juice with a 400mg dose of nitrate per shot. You take the shot 1 to 3 hours before training and up to 6 days before competition. The beet juice has a long lasting effect and is a great trick to have up your sleeve for race day.
I’m not a big fan of the taste of beets, but the shots have 2% lemon juice in them, which is just enough to neutralise the taste a little bit and take the sting off of the beet taste. After drinking the beet juice for a while now I’ve actually grown to like drinking it.
If you’d like to try it for yourself and see if you can improve on your running by drinking beet juice, you can order it from Amazon
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