I’ve tried beet root juice before races, somewhat similar protocol to one of the papers above. Didn’t notice any effect. I like the taste, but it made race prep more complicated, so I stopped.
Some early positive effects for me, but otherwise it’s just an expensive laxative. I now just eat whole beats occasionally. Coffee is so much tastier anyway.
FWIW, Australian Institute of Sport does a nice job tracking supplements and other nutritional items and classifies according to effectiveness and studies supporting effectiveness.
Beet Root supplementation made it into Group A. Here is a link to the infographic:
This is the main landing page for “nutrition”:
So while beet root juice didn’t seem to work for me, I would put it in the “give it a shot” class. Likely won’t hurt and if it works for you that’s great.
2 Likes
“the acute ingestion of a BJ supplement 120 min before training seems produced an ergogenic effect on the muscular endurance performance in RT, particularly, increasing total repetitions performed, accompanied by the same RPE and without changes in blood lactate levels in participants. However, BJ supplementation did not improve performance in terms of movement concentric velocity and power in back squat and bench press. These findings suggest that BJ supplementation could be a suitable strategy to improve muscular endurance, increasing tolerance to RT.”
Hope this helps 
Effects of Beetroot Juice Supplementation on Cardiorespiratory Endurance in Athletes
Acute Effects of Beetroot Juice Supplements on Resistance Training
Thanks, but my post was replying to someone saying caffeine negates the effects of dietary nitrates. It’s a commonly cited idea that may well be true but I can’t find any studies to back it up. I edited my reply to be more clear.
For me Beet Juice, along with other performance supplements (that can support or enhance sport performance) like Beta-Alanine, Creatine, Caffeine etc, they all go into the marginal gains basket.
I.e. small possible gains of maybe +1% that combined may sum up to an overall 3-5% improvement.
This means that on a stand alone basis it is most likely impossible to notice the effect. But when you add up all these small things, including the use of aero socks & helmet, latex/tubolito inner tubes, faster tires & wheels, etc etc, then suddenly you have quite easily gained/saved 30, 40, 50 watts.
Now that is something money can buy! 
This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.
1 Like
