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Beetroot juice is the rare cycling supplement that started in a physiology lab rather than a marketing department. The original finding was genuinely surprising: dietary nitrate reduced the oxygen cost of submaximal exercise — riders produced the same power while consuming less oxygen, which is not supposed to be adjustable by diet.
Fifteen years of follow-up work has both confirmed the mechanism and shrunk the headline. The effect is real, small, and appears to fade as the athlete gets fitter. Here is what is actually known, and what it means for whether a shot of beetroot is worth your money.
Nitric oxide affects blood pressure, which is part of why nitrate is studied clinically as well as athletically. If you take nitrate-based medication such as nitrates for angina, medication for erectile dysfunction, or blood-pressure drugs, talk to your doctor before taking concentrated nitrate supplements. Nothing here is a recommendation to take any product, and supplements are not tightly regulated — competitive athletes should check third-party batch testing.
The pathway, in four steps
Nitrate itself does nothing useful. It is the start of a chain.
Beetroot, rocket, spinach, celery and lettuce are the richest ordinary sources. Concentrated beetroot shots exist because getting a research dose from whole beetroot takes some eating.
Bacteria on the back of the tongue reduce nitrate to nitrite. This step is not optional and not performed by human enzymes — you are outsourcing it to your oral microbiome.
Nitrite is further reduced to nitric oxide, particularly where oxygen is low — which is exactly where a working muscle is.
Lower oxygen cost at a given submaximal power, plus effects on blood flow and calcium handling in fast-twitch fibres. In short: the same watts for slightly less oxygen.
How big is the effect, honestly
The early studies were striking. Nitrate supplementation reduced oxygen cost during submaximal cycling and, in one frequently cited trial, improved tolerance to high-intensity exercise as well. Efficiency improvements of a couple of percentage points were reported — small numbers that matter a great deal if they hold up.
They partly do. A systematic review and meta-analysis of more than eighty randomised controlled studies found a modest overall ergogenic effect, with important qualifications: the benefit was most consistent in recreationally active men, and absent in trials of highly trained endurance athletes and in trials with only female participants. That is a considerably more cautious conclusion than the packaging suggests.
This is where the meta-analytic signal is clearest — and even here the effect is described as small.
Somewhere in between. Worth testing on yourself rather than assuming either way.
In pooled analysis, participants above roughly 65 ml/kg/min showed no ergogenic benefit. Highly trained physiology may already be doing what nitrate does.
Studies with only female participants showed no significant benefit in one large meta-analysis. Women are also badly under-represented in this literature, so this is uncertainty as much as a null result.
Why trained riders respond less
There is a plausible explanation rather than just an awkward statistic. Endurance training already improves the things nitrate is proposed to improve: muscle blood flow and its distribution, mitochondrial function and efficiency, and nitric oxide availability through training-induced adaptation of the endothelium. A study designed specifically to test this found that performance responses to nitrate varied with aerobic fitness, with the least-fit participants gaining the most and the fittest gaining little.
Put crudely: nitrate appears to top up a system that training has already topped up. If your engine is efficient, there is less headroom for a supplement to add.
Dose and timing
The research dose is usually expressed in millimoles. The common protocol is around 6.4–12.8 mmol of nitrate — roughly 400–800 mg — taken 2 to 3 hours before the effort, which is when plasma nitrite tends to peak. Several days of loading, rather than a single acute dose, is also used and may be more reliable.
| Source | Approximate nitrate |
|---|---|
| Concentrated beetroot shot (70 ml) | ~400 mg (6.4 mmol) |
| Rocket, 100 g | very high, ~250–450 mg |
| Spinach, 100 g | high, ~100–300 mg |
| Beetroot, 100 g cooked | ~100–200 mg |
| Lettuce, 100 g | ~100–200 mg |
Vegetable nitrate content varies widely with soil, season and variety, so these are rough ranges rather than reliable figures. Concentrated shots exist precisely because the dose in whole vegetables is so variable.
The nitrate-to-nitrite conversion is done by bacteria living on your tongue. Using an antibacterial mouthwash removes them — and in a controlled study, the rise in plasma nitrite after a nitrate load was markedly attenuated when participants used an antibacterial mouthwash. If you are going to bother with beetroot juice at all, skip the antiseptic mouthwash that morning. It is the single easiest way to waste the dose, and one of the odder pieces of practical advice in sports nutrition.
The practical verdict
- It is not a scam, and it is not a breakthrough. The mechanism is real, the effect is small, and it is conditional on who you are.
- Try it in training, twice. Same route or same indoor workout, once with and once without. One trial proves nothing — but if you cannot detect a difference across a couple of honest attempts, it is probably not worth the ongoing cost.
- Expect gut side effects. Concentrated beetroot juice does not suit everyone, and race day is not the time to discover that. Red urine is harmless and startling.
- Eat the vegetables anyway. Nitrate-rich leafy greens are good for you for reasons that have nothing to do with cycling.
- Fix the big things first. Sleep, consistent training, and adequate carbohydrate on the bike each dwarf anything a beetroot shot will do.
If you do want to test it properly, the difficulty outdoors is that no two rides are the same — wind, traffic and temperature swamp a 1–2% effect easily. A repeatable indoor effort is a far better test bed, and Moveee Indoor will hold the same workout constant so the only thing that changed is what you drank three hours earlier. Even then, be sceptical of a single result: the effect you are looking for is smaller than your day-to-day variation.
Sources 6
Where this article summarises a study, the study itself is linked — not a write-up of it.
- 1 Jones AM Dietary nitrate supplementation and exercise performance · Sports Medicine · 2014
- 2 Senefeld JW, Wiggins CC, Regimbal RJ, et al. Ergogenic effect of nitrate supplementation: a systematic review and meta-analysis · Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise · 2020
- 3 Bailey SJ, Winyard P, Vanhatalo A, et al. Dietary nitrate supplementation reduces the O2 cost of low-intensity exercise and enhances tolerance to high-intensity exercise in humans · Journal of Applied Physiology · 2009
- 4 Larsen FJ, Weitzberg E, Lundberg JO, Ekblom B Effects of dietary nitrate on oxygen cost during exercise · Acta Physiologica · 2007
- 5 Porcelli S, Ramaglia M, Bellistri G, et al. Aerobic fitness affects the exercise performance responses to nitrate supplementation · Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise · 2015
- 6 Govoni M, Jansson EÅ, Weitzberg E, Lundberg JO The increase in plasma nitrite after a dietary nitrate load is markedly attenuated by an antibacterial mouthwash · Nitric Oxide · 2008
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