Can This New Sports Supplement Beat Beets in Making You Faster?
Dietary nitrates turn to nitric oxide (NO) in the body, which is helpful for exercise performance because it dilates your blood vessels.
Beetroot juice is commonly used as a nitrate-rich sports supplement and has been shown to improve cycling performance.
Now, a new study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research reports that recreationally active adults who supplemented with nitrate-rich red spinach extract significantly improved their time trial performance.
On your left, beets. There’s another nitrate-rich supplement coming by hot, which shows promise for improving exercise performance and lowering blood pressure as well as, if not better, than the popular ruby-colored root.
The popular ruby-colored root has been the supplement king due to its nitrate content. Research shows that dietary nitrates enhance nitric oxide production (NO) in your muscles, which prompts a cascade of reactions in your body that can help you on the bike. Mainly, NO relaxes the smooth muscles in your blood vessel walls so they can open wide to let more blood flow through, which lowers your blood pressure and improves exercise performance.
A number of studies show that when cyclists boost their NO levels, they perform better. In one study, recreational cyclists drinking high doses of concentrated beetroot juice (a natural source of nitrates) used about 3 percent less oxygen-meaning less energy to pedal the same pace-during exercise tests than those drinking a placebo drink.
Even already highly trained riders can benefit from upping their NO levels. They just need double the usual dose (about 12 mmol of nitrate instead of 6 mmol) to get the boost, because their bodies already produce high levels of NO on their own.
Last year, even the International Olympic Committee gave an official nod to beetroot supplements, acknowledging that nitrates have “good evidence of benefits.”
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So it’s not surprising that other nitrate-rich veggies are trying to get in on the action. Enter red spinach extract, which isn’t actually spinach, but rather the crimson leaves of the amaranth plant. Research suggests that red spinach extract contains more nitrates than beets, and one study showed that a single dose raised nitrate levels in healthy adults after just 30 to 60 minutes-and NO levels stayed elevated for eight hours.
And it’s possible they may help your performance, too: According to the new study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, supplementing with red spinach extract significantly improved cycling power, speed, and time trial performance in recreationally active adults.
In the study, researchers had 17 active men and women take either 1 gram of red spinach extract or a fake supplement for seven days and then another dose one hour before performing a 4K cycling time trial. The red spinach supplementation appeared to give the women in the study a significant performance boost.
The red spinach supplementing riders finished the time trial an average of 6 seconds faster (6:44 vs. 6:50) than those getting the fake capsules. Their average power was 4.3 watts higher (185.9W vs. 181.6W), and their average speed was 22.2 mph vs. 21.9 mph.
There was no difference between red spinach supplement or placebo time trial results among the men.
Why the gender difference? Researchers don’t yet know. Though previous research has found nitrate benefits for men, this isn’t the first study to show women having a bigger performance benefit.
It may be because women have lower circulating nitrate levels to begin with. Previous studies have found that men have higher resting plasma nitrate levels than women. So women may get a bigger benefit from a supplemental boost.
As far as where you get your nitrates-beets or red spinach extract-there’s no definitive answer there either, says nitrate researcher and exercise physiologist Andrew Coggan, Ph.D., associate professor at IUPUI in Indianapolis, who has measured the nitrate content of products containing both beets (where, for the record, there is quite a bit of variability in the market) and red spinach extract.
After measuring the nitrate content in red spinach extract for one company, Coggan found it even richer in exercise-enhancing nitrates than beets.
“It was quite rich in nitrates-several fold higher per gram, in fact, than any beet powder that I have tested,” Coggan said. “Though I don’t think that it really provides any benefit, or disadvantage, versus a beet-based product.”
So, like so much in sports nutrition, it comes down to personal preference, trial and error, and finding what works for you. If you like beets, you have a wide variety of products to choose from, including concentrated shots, powders, capsules, and, of course, juicing your own (though you need a lot of beets to get a therapeutic dose).
If you’re not a lover of the earthy root veggies, now you have another option to try. You can find the red spinach extract in capsule and powder form.
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