Beetroot is the rare supplement that is both genuinely evidence-based and consistently oversold. The science behind it is real, some of the cleanest in sports nutrition, and it earned beetroot a place in serious athletes' routines. But the marketing has sanded off every caveat that makes the science honest: how small the effect is, who it actually helps, and the handful of practical mistakes, including one involving your mouthwash, that can cancel it entirely.
Here is what dietary nitrate really does, and how to get the most from it if you decide it is worth your time.
The short answer
- It works, a little. Dietary nitrate improves endurance by a small margin, up to about 2 to 3 percent in the best trials and less on average, one of the better-evidenced ergogenic aids, but the effect is small.
- It helps endurance capacity more than time-trial performance, and helps recreational athletes far more than elites, whose bodies are already efficient.
- It reliably lowers blood pressure, by about 4 mm Hg systolic, which may be its most dependable benefit.
- Antibacterial mouthwash can cancel it by killing the mouth bacteria the pathway depends on.
- Dose and form decide everything. Many powders and capsules contain too little nitrate to do anything.
- It is not an L-arginine or L-citrulline "nitric oxide booster." Those work through a different, weaker pathway.
What beetroot actually does
Beetroot's active ingredient is not a vitamin or an antioxidant; it is inorganic nitrate, which beets happen to concentrate from the soil. Once you swallow it, nitrate is reduced to nitrite by bacteria living on your tongue, and then to nitric oxide, a molecule that relaxes blood vessels and, crucially for exercise, makes your muscles work more efficiently.
The foundational finding is that dietary nitrate lowers the oxygen cost of exercise. In the original 2007 study, nitrate reduced the oxygen used at several submaximal work rates and raised efficiency, something researchers had thought was essentially fixed. The first beetroot-juice trial then showed the same effect from a whole food and extended how long people could tolerate hard exercise. Later work pinned down the mechanism: nitrate reduces the ATP cost of producing muscle force, so you get the same output for less fuel. That efficiency gain is the real engine behind everything below.
Before the details, here is the whole picture at a glance, graded honestly by use.
| For… | What the evidence shows | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Endurance capacity (time to exhaustion) | Small to moderate benefit | Meta-analyses find a real effect on how long you can hold a hard pace |
| Endurance time-trial performance | Small, often trivial | The average time-trial effect is close to zero once pooled |
| Blood pressure | Lowers systolic by about 4 mm Hg | One of the more reliable effects, and a reason non-athletes take it |
| Recreational or moderately trained athletes | This is where it works | The economy and capacity gains show up most clearly here |
| Elite endurance athletes | Near zero | Their NO metabolism is already efficient, so there is little to add |
| Team-sport and repeated sprints | Small and mixed | Some trials show faster sprints and more high-intensity running, others nothing |
| Resistance training (reps, power, velocity) | Small | More reps to failure and higher bar velocity, but not maximal strength |
| Maximal strength and peak torque | No effect | Pure one-rep-max and isokinetic peak torque do not improve |
| Recovery after damaging exercise | Small to moderate | Faster return of jump and strength, and less soreness, in several trials |
| Cognition / brain blood flow | No reliable effect | Pooled trials show no benefit to cognitive function |
Ordered roughly from best-supported to weakest. The sections below unpack each row.
Beetroot is not the same as a nitric oxide booster
This is the distinction the entire supplement aisle blurs, and getting it right saves you money. There are two separate ways the body makes nitric oxide, and beetroot uses the one most "NO booster" products do not.
| Supplement | How it makes nitric oxide | What it does | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beetroot / dietary nitrate | Nitrate to nitrite to nitric oxide, using bacteria in your mouth. Works even when oxygen is low. | Endurance economy and capacity; blood pressure | The better-evidenced route |
| L-citrulline | Raises blood arginine, feeding the enzyme (NOS) that makes nitric oxide. A separate, oxygen-dependent pathway. | Small effects on reps and a modest blood-pressure drop; little for endurance | Real but small, and different from nitrate |
| L-arginine | The same NOS pathway, taken directly, but most of an oral dose is destroyed before it reaches the blood. | Poor oral bioavailability; largely ineffective as an ergogenic aid | Skip it |
Beetroot uses the nitrate-nitrite-nitric oxide pathway, which works even when oxygen is scarce, exactly when exercising muscle needs it. The L-citrulline and L-arginine route is a different enzyme system entirely.
The practical upshot: if you want the beetroot evidence, you need actual nitrate, from beetroot or leafy greens, not an arginine-based pre-workout. Citrulline is not useless, it has small effects on reps and blood pressure, but it is a different tool, and we cover it and the products in our nitric oxide supplement guide.
Endurance: real, small, and mostly for non-elites
Endurance is where beetroot has its best evidence, and also where the honest effect size is smallest. In a simulated cycling time trial, acute beetroot juice improved 4-kilometer and 16-kilometer performance by about 2.7 to 2.8 percent, a meaningful margin in a race. That is the optimistic end.
Pool all the trials and the picture cools. The clearest pattern is that nitrate helps endurance capacity, how long you can hold a hard effort, more than it helps a fixed time trial. One meta-analysis found a small-to-moderate benefit for time-to-exhaustion (effect size 0.33) but a trivial, non-significant effect on time trials. And the largest analysis, pooling around 80 studies, put the overall performance benefit at a standardized effect of just 0.174, real but, in the authors' word, objectively small.
Who responds, and who does not
The single most important moderator is your fitness. The ergogenic response to nitrate is inversely related to aerobic fitness: one study found the fitter the person, the smaller the drop in their oxygen cost, with a correlation of 0.80. The reason is a ceiling effect. Elite endurance athletes already have highly efficient nitric-oxide metabolism, so there is little room to improve.
The trials bear this out. A meta-analysis that split athletes from non-athletes found nitrate was ergogenic in non-athletes but showed no significant effect in athletes, and the largest analysis found essentially zero effect in well-trained endurance athletes. Individual studies in well-trained cyclists and elite distance runners raised plasma nitrite substantially and still found no improvement in oxygen cost, time trials or 1500-meter performance. If you are already very fit, temper your expectations. If you are recreationally active, you are in the group where beetroot works best.
Sprints, team sport and lifting
Beyond steady endurance, the evidence gets thinner and more mixed.
For team sport and repeated sprints, several trials in recreational and trained players found beetroot improved high-intensity intermittent running, with Yo-Yo intermittent-running distances rising by about 3 to 4 percent, though the sprint-time data themselves are mixed. Other trials found nothing, and one repeated-sprint cycling study actually found slightly worse results with nitrate. Call it plausible and inconsistent.
For resistance training, a meta-analysis found nitrate produced small gains in reps-to-failure, mean power and bar velocity, but not in maximal strength. A separate analysis found no effect on maximal isokinetic peak torque at all. The likely reason is mechanistic: nitrate's benefit concentrates in fast-twitch (type II) muscle fibers, which matters more for repeated submaximal efforts than for a single maximal lift. So beetroot may help you grind out an extra rep or two, but it is not a strength supplement, and creatine remains the better choice there.
Recovery and soreness
A newer and genuinely promising use is recovery. Beetroot is anti-inflammatory, and a meta-analysis of beetroot juice around damaging exercise found faster recovery of jump and isometric strength, with countermovement-jump recovery improved by a large margin at 24 to 72 hours, plus reduced soreness. A landmark trial using 100 drop jumps found high-dose beetroot restored jump performance faster than placebo, and a 2026 dose-response analysis found it lowered creatine kinase and sped strength recovery.
One caveat carries over from the wider recovery literature: because beetroot works partly as an antioxidant, blunting the inflammation of hard exercise, hammering it around every session during a muscle-building or base-training block may work against the adaptation you are training for. Save it for when bouncing back quickly matters most. We lay out the whole recovery shelf in our guide to supplements for muscle recovery and soreness.
Blood pressure: maybe the most reliable benefit
Set aside sport and beetroot has a benefit many athletes never think about: it lowers blood pressure. A foundational meta-analysis found inorganic nitrate and beetroot juice reduced systolic blood pressure by about 4.4 mm Hg, and a 4-week trial in people with hypertension, using a nitrate-free beetroot juice as the placebo, found clinic blood pressure fell by roughly 8 over 2 mm Hg. The effect grows with daily dosing over a couple of weeks and is larger in people who actually have high blood pressure.
That is a real, food-based effect, and it is the reason some people drink beetroot juice who never exercise hard. It is not a substitute for prescribed medication, and it is worth a conversation with your doctor if you take blood-pressure drugs. One thing beetroot does not reliably do, despite the claims, is improve thinking or brain blood flow: a meta-analysis found no benefit to cognitive function. Our blood pressure and supplements guide puts it in context.
How to actually use it: dose, timing and the mouthwash trap
Getting beetroot to work is mostly about three numbers and one surprising rule.
- Dose. Trials that work use roughly 6 to 8 millimoles of nitrate, about 400 to 500 mg, which is one to two concentrated 70 mL beetroot shots. In a dose-response study the lowest dose, about 4 millimoles, did nothing, while 8 millimoles and above worked, so the most common way to waste beetroot is to take too little.
- Timing. Blood nitrite peaks about 2 to 3 hours after you drink it, so take it a couple of hours before your event, not at the start line.
- Loading. Effects appear acutely but are maintained and can build with daily dosing over several days, which is why athletes often load for the few days before a competition.
- The mouthwash trap. This is the one almost nobody knows. The pathway's first step needs bacteria on your tongue. Antibacterial mouthwash kills them: studies show it cuts the rise in blood nitrite by around 90 percent, wipes out beetroot's blood-pressure effect, and can raise blood pressure on its own. If you are using beetroot, skip the antibacterial mouthwash around your dose.
Juice, powder or capsules
Form matters more than almost any label admits. An analysis of commercial beetroot products found the nitrate content varied by roughly fifty-fold between products, with large lot-to-lot variation even within a single product. Many powders, capsules and gummies contain little actual nitrate, because processing can strip it out, and most do not state their nitrate content at all.
The rule is simple: buy on nitrate milligrams, not on "beet" branding. The forms with the most evidence are standardized concentrated juices or shots that state their nitrate dose. If a product does not tell you how much nitrate is in it, you have no way to know whether it can work. And you do not strictly need a supplement at all: whole beetroot, and even more so arugula and spinach, are nitrate-rich foods. Our guide to nitric oxide supplements covers specific products.
The links below are affiliate links. NutraSmarts may earn a commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you.
- Concentrated beetroot shotsThe format with the most evidence. Look for one that states its nitrate content, roughly 400 mg (about 6.5 millimoles) per shot; that number, not the brand, is what matters.
- HumanN SuperBeetsA popular beet powder and the top pick in our nitric oxide guide. Convenient and palatable, but like most powders it does not disclose its nitrate content, so you cannot assume it matches the juice studies; treat it as a daily maintenance beet, not a replacement for a dose-stated shot.
- NOW Beet Root CapsulesA budget capsule option. Capsules are easy to take but often carry little nitrate, so treat this as a modest choice, not the equivalent of a standardized shot.
- Nutricost L-CitrullineA different nitric oxide pathway, useful for reps-to-failure and a modest blood-pressure drop rather than for endurance. Not a substitute for nitrate.
How we make money: the links above are affiliate links, so NutraSmarts may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. It does not change the advice: the picks follow this article's logic, leading with the dose-stated shot format that has the most evidence, staying honest about the powders and capsules here that do not disclose their nitrate, and using a plain category search for the shots rather than a paid placement. We do not accept payment from brands to feature them. See our affiliate disclosure.
Safety, beeturia and the nitrate-cancer question
For most people beetroot is very safe. The most common surprise is beeturia, harmless pink or red urine, which shows up in an estimated 10 to 14 percent of people and is sometimes more common with low iron. High doses of juice can cause mild stomach upset, and the juice carries sugar.
The nitrate-and-cancer fear deserves a clear answer, because it confuses two different things. The genuine concern is with nitrite and the nitrosamines formed from it in cured and processed meat, not with vegetable nitrate. About 80 percent of the nitrate people eat comes from vegetables, and in the research the two sources behave oppositely: in a large gastric-cancer analysis, dietary nitrate was associated with lower risk while nitrite and nitrosamines were associated with higher risk, and a recent review found nitrate specifically from plant sources was not associated with digestive cancers. The likely reason is that vegetables come packaged with vitamin C and polyphenols that block nitrosamine formation. Beetroot is not bacon.
Frequently asked questions
Does beetroot juice actually improve exercise performance?
Yes, but modestly and not for everyone. Dietary nitrate from beetroot lowers the oxygen cost of exercise and improves endurance, but the average effect across the research is small, a standardized effect of about 0.17 in the largest meta-analysis, with the best single trials showing roughly 2 to 3 percent. It helps how long you can sustain hard effort more than it helps a fixed time trial, it works best in recreationally trained people, and it shrinks to essentially nothing in elite endurance athletes whose bodies are already efficient. A meaningful minority of people do not respond at all.
How much beetroot juice should I drink, and when?
Trials that work use roughly 6 to 8 millimoles of nitrate, about 400 to 500 mg, or one to two 70 mL concentrated beetroot shots. In a dose-response study the lowest dose, about 4 millimoles, did nothing while higher doses did, so under-dosing is a common way to waste it. Take it about 2 to 3 hours before exercise, when blood nitrite peaks. For an event, some people load daily for a few days beforehand. More than the effective dose does not add much.
Does mouthwash really cancel out beetroot juice?
It can, and this is the most-missed practical point. The first step of the pathway depends on bacteria on your tongue that convert nitrate to nitrite. Antibacterial mouthwash kills them, and studies show it cuts the rise in blood nitrite by around 90 percent, abolishes beetroot's blood-pressure benefit, and even nudges blood pressure up on its own. If you use beetroot for performance or blood pressure, skip the antibacterial mouthwash, at least around your dose.
Is beetroot the same as a nitric oxide supplement like L-arginine or citrulline?
No, and the difference matters. Beetroot works through the nitrate-nitrite-nitric oxide pathway, using oral bacteria. L-arginine and L-citrulline work through a completely separate enzyme pathway. L-citrulline has small, real effects on reps-to-failure and blood pressure but does little for endurance; L-arginine is a weak nitric oxide booster for exercise, because much of an oral dose is broken down by intestinal arginase before it reaches the blood, though at high doses it can still modestly lower blood pressure. If a pre-workout lists arginine as its nitric oxide booster, that is the weakest of the three for performance.
Does beetroot juice lower blood pressure?
Yes, and this may be its most reliable benefit. Pooled trials show inorganic nitrate and beetroot juice lower systolic blood pressure by about 4 mm Hg, with a 4-week trial in people with hypertension showing clinic blood pressure dropping by roughly 8 over 2 mm Hg. The effect is larger with daily dosing over weeks. It is a food-based effect worth knowing about, but not a replacement for prescribed blood-pressure medication; talk to your doctor before changing anything.
Is beetroot juice safe? What about nitrates and cancer?
For most people it is very safe. The main quirk is beeturia, harmless pink or red urine, which happens in some people. The nitrate-and-cancer worry is really about nitrite and nitrosamines formed in cured and processed meat, not about vegetable nitrate. About 80 percent of the nitrate people eat comes from vegetables, and nitrate specifically from plant sources is not associated with digestive cancers, likely because vegetables also supply the vitamin C and polyphenols that block nitrosamine formation. People with low blood pressure or on blood-pressure or erectile-dysfunction medications that affect nitric oxide should check with a doctor first.
Does beetroot help with muscle recovery and soreness?
The evidence is promising but newer and smaller than the endurance data. Beetroot is anti-inflammatory, and several trials and a meta-analysis show it speeds the recovery of jump and strength after damaging exercise and reduces soreness, including a landmark study using 100 drop jumps. As with other antioxidant-type recovery aids, that same anti-inflammatory action is a reason not to hammer it around every session during a hard training block. We cover the recovery picture in full in our guide to muscle recovery supplements.
Are beetroot powders and capsules as good as the juice?
Often not, and this is a real buyer-beware point. The nitrate content of beetroot products is wildly inconsistent: one analysis found lot-to-lot variation within a single product and roughly fifty-fold differences between products, and many powders and capsules contain little actual nitrate because processing can strip it out. The forms with the most evidence are standardized concentrated juice or shots that state their nitrate content. If a label does not tell you the nitrate dose, you cannot know if it works. Whole beetroot, arugula and spinach are nitrate-rich foods too.
The bottom line
Beetroot is a legitimate ergogenic aid whose honest description is unglamorous: a small endurance benefit, biggest in recreational athletes and near-zero in elites, plus a reliable few-millimeter drop in blood pressure and a promising recovery effect. It is not a nitric oxide booster of the arginine kind, it needs a real nitrate dose taken a couple of hours ahead, and antibacterial mouthwash can quietly cancel the whole thing.
If you are a recreational endurance athlete, or you want a food-based nudge on blood pressure, beetroot is one of the few supplements that earns a cautious yes, as long as you buy on nitrate content and use it right. If you are elite, or chasing maximal strength, spend your money elsewhere.