Beetroot juice has become one of those supplements that seems to show up everywhere, from endurance races to gym bags to the refrigerator of the guy who owns entirely too much compression gear.  But unlike plenty of supplements with more marketing than evidence, beetroot juice actually has some solid science behind it.  The key ingredient isn’t the beet itself; it’s dietary nitrate.  After you consume nitrate, your body converts it to nitrite and eventually nitric oxide, which can influence blood flow, muscle energetics, and how efficiently your body uses oxygen during exercise.  That last part is important because it gives us a clue about where beetroot juice may actually improve performance...and where it probably won’t.

For endurance exercise, the evidence is pretty compelling.  In a landmark randomized, double-blind crossover study, Bailey and colleagues had eight healthy men consume 500 mL of beetroot juice daily for six days.  Compared with placebo, beetroot juice reduced the oxygen cost of moderate-intensity exercise and increased time to exhaustion during severe-intensity cycling from 583 seconds to 675 seconds - roughly a 16% improvement.  In other words, participants were able to sustain hard aerobic work longer while using oxygen more efficiently.  That doesn’t mean beetroot juice magically increases your VO₂ max or turns your Saturday bike ride into the Tour de France, but it does suggest that nitrate can improve exercise efficiency and tolerance when oxygen utilization is an important part of the performance equation.

But does that translate to lifting weights?  A 2025 study by Tan and colleagues put that question to the test.  Eighteen resistance-trained men consumed four different beetroot juice conditions containing essentially no nitrate, about 6 mmol, 12 mmol, or 24 mmol of nitrate, approximately 2.5 hours before training.  Researchers then measured countermovement-jump performance along with power and velocity during back squats and bench presses at 50% and 75% of 1RM.  Blood nitrate and nitrite rose dramatically as the doses increased, confirming that the supplement was doing exactly what it was supposed to do physiologically.  The problem?  Performance didn’t improve.  No meaningful advantage showed up in jumping, squat power, squat velocity, bench-press power, or bench-press velocity at any dose.

And this is where exercise physiology matters.  During sustained aerobic work, improving oxygen efficiency can be a legitimate performance advantage.  Heavy resistance training is a different animal.  A short set of squats or presses depends heavily on phosphocreatine availability, anaerobic energy production, neuromuscular recruitment, technique, and force production—not simply how efficiently you can deliver and use oxygen.  So while nitrate may improve the physiology that helps you hold a hard cycling effort longer, that same mechanism may not solve whatever is limiting your third heavy squat rep.  More nitric oxide does not automatically equal more strength.  The Tan study illustrates this beautifully: the biological response happened, but the performance benefit didn’t.

So, what is beetroot juice actually good for? 

If your goal involves endurance, sustained high-intensity aerobic work, or improving exercise efficiency, beetroot juice is a supplement worth considering.  If your workout is primarily squats, presses, deadlifts, and other short-duration strength efforts, current evidence gives us far less reason to expect an acute performance boost.