Are Beets The Secret to Easier Workouts?
Preload your next ride with beet juice: Drinking a glass of the stuff each day may make your workouts easier, according to new research from University of California at Davis and Korea's Kyung Hee University.
Past research showed that drinking beet juice just before working out can increase your tolerance for high-intensity exercise, most likely due to the veggie's high concentration of nitrates, but researchers were curious to see how regularly sipping beet juice can affect your body long-term.
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In the study, 14 men in their 20s drank 70 ml of concentrated beet juice (with the nitrate equivalent of 300 ml of regular beet juice) each morning for about 2 weeks. Half of the study participants drank the regular beet juice you'd find at the grocery store; the other half guzzled nitrate-depleted beet juice. When the guys were put through high-intensity cycling workouts, the ones who'd had the nitrate-rich beet juice had lower blood pressure.
"Because their hearts weren't working as hard to pump blood into circulation, they could push themselves at the same intensity for a longer period of time," says study coauthor Charles Stebbins, PhD. That same group of participants also had better blood flow and oxygen delivery to their muscles, he says.
Since the only difference between the two groups was the amount of nitrates they were drinking each day, researchers are pretty confident that's what's at play. And just because the study was done on a bunch of guys, don't think that women won't get the same benefits: Past research has confirmed that ladies who drink beet juice will also have lower blood pressure during exercise, Stebbins says.
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If you're not a big fan of the bright red stuff, try incorporating it into your next smoothie—it'll definitely help you push through the exhaustion that normally hits halfway through your spin class. (Try this Cran-Beet Crusher smoothie recipe.) Or you can get nitrates through other healthy additions to your diet: A 3.5-ounce serving of celery, chervil, cress, arugula, spinach, or, of course, beets will give you about 250 mg—the same as you'd get from a glass of beet juice. And of course, you don't need to juice the beets yourself to get the benefits: This beet powder from the Bicycling Store is an easy alternative.
This article originally appeared on Prevention.com.
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