Add 'this' to your diet for improved exercise performance

Whether you’re just starting out with Couch to 5K or have a few triathlons under your belt, it’s probably fair to say that anything that makes endurance sport even a little easier would be warmly welcomed by all! Well, one such helper might just surprise you. We all know that vegetables bring us a huge range of health benefits, but could they also improve sporting performance?

The answer is ‘probably’, and that is down to something called dietary nitrate. This is present in certain plants and is converted in the body to the very useful molecule, nitric oxide. Which, among other things, widens our blood vessels, thereby improving muscular blood flow and oxygen efficiency and therefore improving endurance.

If you’ve seen anything on this topic before, it’s probably been about beetroot juice (as this is the most widely researched in the literature), but other vegetables like spinach, rocket, lettuce, and Swiss chard are all great sources of nitrate too.  

While it certainly wouldn’t do any harm to include more of these colourful vegetables in our diets, unfortunately, it’s not quite as simple as that (when is it ever?). In order to get a performance benefit, the minimum recommended dose in the literature would be equivalent to two daily 80g portions of these high nitrate vegetables. Given that a whole bag of rocket is around 60-80g, this would be easier for some of those sources than others!

And this is why many of the studies have used beetroot juice, as it’s a more practical (and measurable) way of consuming this quantity of nitrate; 500ml beetroot juice is equivalent to those two 80g portions. In more recent years, a few brands have gone one step further, producing concentrated beetroot shots that have the same quantity of nitrates in a much smaller volume.

Why not try it for yourself and make your own high nitrate juices? Whichever method you choose, the best time to consume it is 1-3 hours before exercise. One last practical tip – and this is a strange one – is to avoid brushing your teeth, chewing gum, or using antibacterial mouthwash between your consuming your nitrate and exercising because oral bacteria are essential in the nitrate conversion process!

Is it worth the effort, you ask? Well, the effect sizes might seem unimpressive (a little under 1% performance improvement in athletes), but when you consider that this would be the difference between twelfth place and a gold medal in the London 2012 Olympic men’s 10,000m final, you can start to appreciate the scientific interest. And the really good news for us mere mortals is that this effect size seems to be more powerful in less-trained, recreational athletes.

Besides some discolouration of your number ones and twos (which beetroot eaters will already be no stranger to), there are no reported side effects, so dietary nitrates represent a plant-based, low-risk (and very much legal) potential performance enhancer. So why not give it a try and see if you can detect a difference? Happy munching and juicing!