Written by Garett Reid | NSCA, CSCS, CISSN, M.S.E.S.S
Fact checked by Andrew Lenau, ISSA CPT & Sports Nutritionist
FACT CHECKED
Pre-workout, creatine, and protein powder make the list of most beloved supplements for the majority of lifters. And for good reason as they all play their role in supporting muscle growth.
But if beetroot juice isn't on your list of best workout-supporting supplements, you may want to make room for it in your pre-lifting routine. Considered to be the world's best natural pre-workout, beetroot juice has become extremely popular among many in the fitness community looking for a clean pre-workout boost.
And with new research showing just how effective it is, there's even more reason to start taking it. But before you do, let's discuss beetroot juice in detail, including what it is and how science-backed studies have found it to be helpful for gym goers.
Table of Contents:
- What Is Beetroot Juice?
- What Is Torque?
- How Beetroot Juice Helps Build Muscle
- Beetroot Juice Benefits
- When To Take Beet Juice & How Much To Take
What Is Beetroot Juice?
Beetroot is a type of bulbous vegetable that is sweet in flavor with a purplish color. Until recently, its leaves, also known as beet greens, were the more popular part of the vegetable, but over the years, its juice has also become quite popular.
Beetroot juice is the juice that's extracted from beets. It's dark purple and provides a relatively intense, earthy, and sweet flavor. Beetroot juice is not only packed with health benefits, but research has shown it improves your torque production.
What is Torque?
Before we go any further, let's examine what exactly muscle torque is. Muscle torque describes your body's ability to rotate and move various body parts, such as your arms and legs, into stable, load-lifting positions before and during lifting.
Essentially, torque enables your body to be stable. The more stable you are, the more powerful you can be. And the more power there is behind your movements, the more likely you can achieve muscle hypertrophy.
When thinking of how torque is helpful for lifting, think of this: The more you are able to maximize a muscle's torque, the more optimally you will be able to strengthen it.
Does Beetroot Juice Help Build Muscle?
A recent study examined the effect of dietary nitrate consumption on the human body and performance, discovering that, upon completion, nitrate supplementation causes an increase in muscle torque production1,2.
Previous studies had already found that nitrate supplementation was capable of increasing exercise performance. But, up until this study, researchers weren't entirely sure how it worked to increase exercise performance.
In other words, what happens after you eat nitrates that leads to increased torque production?
We're going to get into the details of the study, but before we do, let's succinctly answer the question of whether beetroot juice helps build muscle. The answer? Yes, it can help add mass, as taking beetroot juice increases your muscle force during workouts. This leads to an ability to lift heavier with more powerful contractions, which plays a key role in muscle hypertrophy.
How The Beetroot Juice Study Was Set Up
The researchers used 10 healthy volunteers in a randomized crossover study to answer this question.
First, a muscle biopsy was taken to measure the concentration of muscle nitrate. Next, some of the volunteers consumed potassium nitrate, found in beetroot juice, while others consumed a placebo consisting of potassium chloride. Muscle biopsies were taken twice, 1-hour post-supplementation and 3 hours post-supplementation.
The volunteers then performed 60 maximal quadriceps muscle contractions. After the 60 contractions were performed, a muscle biopsy was immediately taken again.
The measurements of all the muscle biopsies were collected and compared with one another to form a conclusion about the supplementation.
What Were The Study's Findings?
As far as the placebo goes, it caused no alteration to the level of nitrates in the muscle.
But for those who took the nitrates supplementation, muscle nitrate levels elevated significantly, from ~35 to 147 nmol/g at the 1-hour and 3-hour mark. Further, after this group exercised, their nitrate levels significantly decreased, indicating that the muscles had utilized the nitrate supply.
The researchers then examined the difference in muscle contractions to see if the alterations in the supplement group had any real effect.
Compared with the placebo group, the supplement group had a mean muscle torque production that was 7% greater. This primarily occurred during the first 18 contractions and correlated with the drop of muscle nitrate during exercise.
Beetroot Juice & Muscle Torque Takeaways
The first obvious takeaway is that taking a nitrate supplementation that includes compounds found in beetroot juice can improve your exercise performance by increasing muscle torque production. This study in particular showed improvements in maximal voluntary muscle contractions of the quadriceps.
So, to put this into practical application, taking beetroot juice before a leg workout, for example, could lead to more powerful contractions throughout your routine, enabling your muscles to lift heavier, work harder, and be thoroughly fatigued.
In addition, researchers were able to pinpoint and track the accumulation of muscle nitrate consumption. Consuming it leads to an increase of nitrate in your muscles, causing a subsequent improvement in workout performance. As the nitrate is used, there is then less of it in the muscles.
In the past, we had a pretty good idea this was happening, but thanks to this research, we now know for sure. This also means that there's more conclusive evidence that consuming beetroot juice before exercise increases your muscle nitrate levels, and in turn, leads to a better lifting session.
In other words, your boost in performance isn't in your mind or a placebo effect. It's actually working.
How Beetroot Juice Improves Workout Performance
Technically known as beta vulgaris, beets pack a ton of nutritional value in their purple juice. That's cool and all, but you may be wondering how beetroot works to specifically improve your health and workout performance.
The good news is that now that researchers have a better understanding of how eating beets can improve your workout performance, we can now retroactively examine other studies that have demonstrated performance benefits.
Some of the studied benefits of beetroot juice include:
- Induces vasodilation and increased blood flow in type II muscle fibers, recruited mainly in exercise bouts of 30 to 60-second duration.
- Increases available oxygen in the muscles, rather than being activated because of a lack of oxygen.
Let's dig into more of the specific performance benefits of beetroot juice.
1) Beet Juice Increases Nitric Oxide.
The main mechanism by which beet juice works is through its high concentration of nitrates.
Nitrate is a chemical naturally occurring in certain foods, which when consumed, is converted into nitric oxide. It has been verified in multiple studies that consuming beet juice directly causes an increase in nitric oxide in both men and women, as well as in every type of body mass3.
In other words, it works for everybody.
When high levels of nitric oxide are found in the body, it causes the blood vessels to widen and increase blood flow4. This means that drinking beet juice improves your body's ability to deliver oxygen and nutrients to your muscles, ultimately leading to more energy to tackle your workout split.
2) Beetroot Juice Improves Resistance Training Performance.
In 2022, a meta-analysis examined 9 studies to look at the effect of beetroot juice on intermittent, high-intensity efforts5. Collectively, these studies looked at single-bout performance, intermittent efforts, chronic use, and acute use.
With resistance training, the meta-analysis found that after chronic supplementation, beetroot juice improves the number of repetitions performed. For example, one study's participants improved their repetitions of 60% 1RM by 18.9%.
Interestingly, the study also found that 1RM improvement occurred after just one dose. This means you don't need to worry about taking beetroot juice for an extended period of time to get results.
Instead, you can take some whenever you feel you need an extra energy boost. Consider taking it before your next chest workout and see if you're able to push out a few more bench press reps!
3) Beet Juice Improves Intermittent High-Intensity Efforts.
Most sports are defined as high-intensity intermittent exercise, with examples including soccer, football, and tennis, all of which have long periods of low intensity and are interspersed with bursts of high-intensity effort.
In a study, beetroot juice was found to be most beneficial for exercise efforts that typically involve intermittent, maximum intensity, short-duration (6–10 seconds) activity that is interspersed with brief recovery periods (<30 s)5.
So, if you enjoy playing football with your friends on the weekend, have a glass of fresh juice beforehand and you're guaranteed to be the star. You can also take it before an interval routine, using the work and recovery periods noted above, to get the most out of your workout.
4) Beetroot juice increases oxygen availability.
It's important to note that to effectively supplement with beetroot juice, taking it 2-3 hours before high-intensity efforts is recommended.
And when you do that, it can significantly prolong time to exhaustion in highly intense efforts. A study gave 10.9 mmol NO3 to a group of recreation athletes, who waited 180 minutes and then performed 15 seconds of pedaling at 170% VO2 max with 30-second rest periods until they reached exhaustion.
Researchers found that the beetroot juice supplement was able to increase total work by 20%5. On the cellular level, authors measured increased blood cell concentrations at the microvascular level, suggesting that beetroot juice has the ability to improve oxygen exchange in the muscles.
This improved oxygen availability and oxidative phosphorylation for phosphocreatine regeneration during rest.
What does this mean for you? Taking beetroot juice 2-3 hours before exercise will help you workout longer, even during high-intensity activities.
5) Beetroot Juice Improves Stamina And Time-To-Exhaustion In Endurance Sports.
Before beet juice became popular in the world of lifting and intermittent sports, it was already being consumed in the endurance world for its stamina-providing power.
Drinking beet juice can improve blood flow, creatine production, and oxygen metabolization. When all of these attributes are combined, your body can move farther and faster for longer.
For example, a study in 2012 looked at the effect of beet juice supplementation on cycling endurance6. Twelve male cyclists either consumed concentrated beetroot juice or a placebo. Subjects performed 60 minutes of submaximal cycling, followed by a 10-km time trial.
The results were quite impressive for those who took the beet juice, showing numerous performance improvements, including:
- Improved time-trial performance
- Improved power output
- Lower Submaximal VO₂
This resulted in improvements to their 10km performance, meaning faster speed and longer time at maximal speed until exhaustion. So for those of you who enjoy LISS cardio, beetroot juice may help you extend your workouts, further improving your aerobic endurance.
Additional Beet Juice Benefits
When something natural, like beetroot juice, shows such impressive workout performance improvements, it's a safe bet it's also just plain good for you.
1. Beetroot Juice Is Packed With Vitamins & Minerals.
Beetroot juice contains essential minerals, vitamins, and other nutritional compounds, including vitamin C, carotenoids, phenolic acids, and flavonoids. Many of these compounds act as an anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant and can even lead to low blood pressure. For example, beetroot juice has been found to have high antioxidant capacity levels (TAC) and polyphenols.
What's even more interesting is that the antioxidants from beetroot juice are more bioaccessible than those from other vegetable juices7. In other words, finding an easy beet juice recipe and juicing beets is a quick and effective way to consume these compounds.
2. Beetroot Juice Can Improve Your Health.
The compounds just discussed provide a host of awesome benefits, including lower blood pressure, mitigating inflammation, preventing oxidative stress, preserving endothelial function, and restoring cerebrovascular hemodynamics8.
In fact, beetroot juice is so powerful it's been shown to effectively manage fatigue and other side effects of chemotherapy in cancer patients!
How to Take Beetroot Juice & Best Timing Practices
This leads us to the question: How long does it take for beetroot juice to work?
When to drink beetroot juice can vary depending on what you're taking. There are two different ways to take beetroot juice: chronically, taking it for long periods of time, and acutely, taking it once in a while or on an as-needed basis. If you're taking beetroot juice chronically, the timing doesn't matter as you're providing your muscles with a constant stream of nitrates.
On the other hand, the timing is a bit more important if you're taking beetroot juice for acute supplementation. For example, this might be for someone who only likes taking it for a race.
To optimize the benefits of fresh beet juice, drink 1-2 cups of it (start with 1 and see how it goes) 150-180 minutes before starting your activity. As mentioned above, it takes 2 to 3 hours before your nitrates hit maximal levels, so plan accordingly when determining when to drink beet juice.
Beetroot Juice: Should You Take It?
After examining much of the research on beet juice, it's pretty clear that this stuff works. The majority of studies examining juicing beets have positive and beneficial outcomes.
Interestingly, beetroot juice was originally thought to primarily be an effective supplement for endurance sports, but studies show that beet juice is also effective for anaerobic efforts and resistance training.
In addition, beet juice is 100% natural and brings a host of other health benefits, such as a plethora of anti-oxidants, anti-inflammatory compounds, and other essential vitamins and minerals.
All that considered, whether you find a great beetroot juice recipe and make it yourself or purchase a beet supplement with the same benefits, there's no doubt that beet juice will improve your lifting game.
Ready to begin benefiting from beetroot juice? Check out our article on the 7 Best Beet Supplements!
References:
- Dietary nitrate -- found in beetroot juice -- significantly increases muscle force during exercise: A new study has found that consuming dietary nitrate -- the active molecule in beetroot juice -- significantly increased muscle force while exercising. ScienceDaily. Accessed February 17, 2023. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/01/230123083441.htm
- Kadach, S., Park, J. W., Stoyanov, Z., Black, M. I., Vanhatalo, A., Burnley, M., Walter, P. J., Cai, H., Schechter, A. N., Piknova, B., & Jones, A. M. (2023). 15 N-labeled dietary nitrate supplementation increases human skeletal muscle nitrate concentration and improves muscle torque production. Acta physiologica (Oxford, England), e13924. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/apha.13924
- Tan, M. L., & Hamid, S. B. S. (2021). Beetroot as a Potential Functional Food for Cancer Chemoprevention, a Narrative Review. Journal of cancer prevention, 26(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.15430/JCP.2021.26.1.1
- Baião, D.dosS., Conte-Junior, C. A., Paschoalin, V. M., & Alvares, T. S. (2016). Beetroot juice increase nitric oxide metabolites in both men and women regardless of body mass. International journal of food sciences and nutrition, 67(1), 40–46. https://doi.org/10.3109/09637486.2015.1121469
- Domínguez R, Maté-Muñoz JL, Cuenca E, et al. Effects of beetroot juice supplementation on intermittent high-intensity exercise efforts. Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition. 2018;15(1). doi:https://doi.org/10.1186/s12970-017-0204-9
- Cermak, N. M., Gibala, M. J., & van Loon, L. J. (2012). Nitrate supplementation's improvement of 10-km time-trial performance in trained cyclists. International journal of sport nutrition and exercise metabolism, 22(1), 64–71. https://doi.org/10.1123/ijsnem.22.1.64
- Wootton-Beard PC, Ryan L. A beetroot juice shot is a significant and convenient source of bioaccessible antioxidants. Journal of Functional Foods. 2011;3(4):329-334. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jff.2011.05.007
- Clifford, T., Howatson, G., West, D. J., & Stevenson, E. J. (2015). The potential benefits of red beetroot supplementation in health and disease. Nutrients, 7(4), 2801–2822. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu7042801
Garett Reid
Author