“Beetroot juice improves exercise performance.”
Beetroot juice gives small boosts in some lab exercise tests, but it does little for race-style performance.
Beet juice will not make most people noticeably faster in a race. Any gain is small and shows up mostly in lab tests, such as how long you can keep going at a fixed effort.
If you are curious, try beet juice during training rather than for the first time on race day, and decide whether the small possible gain is worth the cost.
A large umbrella review of 180 studies finds small benefits in some lab tests and little or no benefit in self-paced time trials, which is much less than the "performance booster" claim. Confidence is Moderate rather than Strong because most of the reviews it pooled were rated low or very low quality.
Beetroot juice gives small boosts in some lab exercise tests, but it does little for race-style performance. Across 20 reviews of 180 studies, nitrate helped people keep going longer at a set pace, cover more distance and hold out longer in muscle-endurance tests, but in 7 of 8 reviews of timed trials the result could have been chance.
The benefits were small (standardized effects of about 0.25 to 0.5) and were larger with at least about 370 mg of nitrate a day taken for more than 3 days. Peak power also rose slightly. A separate 2022 review of 24 studies of 5 to 30 minute time trials found only a trivial benefit overall, with a borderline benefit when nitrate was taken for several days. Some of the pooled reviews suggested highly trained endurance athletes gain less. Most of the 20 reviews were rated low or critically low in quality.
- Poon ET, Iu JC, Sum WM, Wong PS, Lo KK, Ali A, Burns SF, Trexler ET. Dietary nitrate supplementation and exercise performance: an umbrella review of 20 published systematic reviews with meta-analyses. Sports Medicine. 2025;55(5):1213-1231. DOI: 10.1007/s40279-025-02194-6. PMID: 40085422. PMCID: PMC12106159
- Wong TH, Sim A, Burns SF. The effects of nitrate ingestion on high-intensity endurance time-trial performance: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Exercise Science and Fitness. 2022;20(4):305-316. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesf.2022.06.004. PMID: 35892115. PMCID: PMC9287610