Beautiful Beetroot.
Beetroot finding more and more research evidence now to suggest that taking beetroot and beetroot juice has various positive effects on health and performance so it contains a lot of nitrate which is reduced in the body to nitrite into nitric oxide and these things seem to help in reducing blood pressure at rest and that can have positive benefits on cardiovascular health but it also seems to reduce the energy and the oxygen cost of exercise and that translates often in endurance athletes into enhanced performance what that does mean actually that that mean that them I can train longer or harder possibly both so you may be able to exercise at the same work rate for a bit longer but what you may prefer to do instead is actually exercise at a higher intensity for the same duration so we find that you know there's a lower oxygen cost of exercising at a particular work rate but while you
exercise you might want to fix the effort that you work at but in so doing you might be exercising at a slightly higher power output and that could be beneficial in terms of the adaptations that you experience to training and can you give me so much wise on how much bid you choose should be interested and during which timeline prior to
competition yeah so in our original studies our early studies we used half a liter per day of beetroot juice in two doses of 250 millilitres and that contained over the course of a day around six millimoles of nitrate but there are there's the possibility now to
buy beetroot juice shots where the nitrate in the juice has become concentrated so now you can get the same amount of nitrate five or six millimoles in a much smaller volume beverage around 70 mils in terms of when you take it there's I think it's useful to take it some two to three hours prior to exercise because it takes that long for the nitrate to be processed into nitrite in the body but there's some evidence nowadays that actually consuming the nitrate for a few days prior to competition in addition to supplementing a few hours prior to competition may be the best approach to and would it be helpful to drink your juice every day we don't know for sure at the moment I don't think that it would do do any harm but we we need to see whether it interacts with the training response if we can find a better training effect with each training session as a consequence of consuming beetroot juice then it may
well be beneficial to take it continuously or on a more chronic basis but the evidence on that is relatively weak at the moment we just haven't done those longer-term studies and like me I don't really like the taste of beetroot juice and I know that there are other vegetable sources which contain large
amounts of this energy booster nitrate can you tell me a bit more I mean can also eat like a plate of spinach yeah so nitrite is contained in a number of green leafy vegetables so it'd be true is one source of nitrate but there's also plentiful nitrate in spinach and lettuce and Rocket and various other
fruits and vegetables as well so consuming more of those products may have very similar effects the the only problem is that although beetroot or spinach does have a high nitrate content on average you never quite know how much it contains when it's there on your plate because the the growing conditions of the vegetable the time of year at which who has grown the amount of time it's spent on the shelf before you
.When you think of beetroot juice, you just kind of think of something sweet and you think
of this...
Like, going and getting a juice from Whole Foods, but you don't really think of the actual
serious athletic boost that you get from it.
Whether you are an athlete or whether you're someone who's just a recreational athlete,
someone that's just going out for a bike ride now and then, you can benefit from beetroot.
Now, let's go ahead and let's break down exactly how this works 'cause there's some really
interesting mechanisms within the body that make beets so phenomenally powerful.
So, interestingly enough, beetroot juice is powerful because of the nitrates in it.
So, you might hear that nitrates and nitrites are bad when they're in things like bacon
and sausage, but the reality is natural nitrites and nitrates are really powerful, like those
in beets.
So, what happens is, when you consume beets or beet juice, you're getting a lot of nitrates
coming in.
The second that those nitrates his your saliva, they reduce to something known as dietary
nitrite,
Not to be confused with nitrate.
It's a more reduced form.
As that nitrite is swallowed, it's metabolized further into something known as nitric oxide.
Now, nitric oxide is a very powerful vasodilator, so we get an increase in blood flow, which
of course is good.
That's going to help us out in a multitude of ways, but when we actually look at the
benefits of beetroot juice, it's less about the vasodilation and more about the lowering
of what's called the oxygen cost.
You see, beets have been shown to lower what is called the oxygen cost of adenosine triphosphate
inside the actual working muscle.
So, what that simply means is it ends up making it so that we need less oxygen to create the
same amount of energy.
There's a lot of science to back this up.
So, literally by taking in beetroot juice, we can work just as hard for less energy or
we can work harder and use more energy. It's all how we ever want to position it.
So, there was a study that was published in the Journal of Sports Medicine that took a
look at this pretty intensely.
They took a loot at the effect of beetroot juice powder for six days on exercise performance.
So, what they did is they had some participants consume a half a liter of beetroot juice and
some participants consume a placebo.
Well, at the end of the six days, they found some pretty phenomenal results.
They found that beetroot juice ended up reducing the overall exercise cost, the oxygen cost
by 19%.
19%.
It literally made their workouts 19% easier when they had beetroot juice, but it gets
even better. They were able to push their time to exhaustion 17%.
So, those that consumed the beetroot juice were able to put their workouts 17% longer.
That's right in line with the 19% easier.
The workout got 19% easier, so it would make sense that you could push it 17% longer.
It just adds up.
So, the reason this is happening is not just because of the vasodilation and the increase
of blood flow.
It's happening because the beetroot juice powder and the nitrates and the nitric oxide
that is a part of it end up acting as what is called a cytochrome c oxidase inhibitor.
You see, that is the last component of what's called the respiratory electron chain.
When we're breathing, we have a series of things that happen in the body.
It's called an electron chain, and the respiratory electron chain ends with the cytochrome c
oxidase.
Normally, what that does is it makes it so that as oxygen travels down this pathway,
it hits this dead end, okay.
So, even if there's spare oxygen, it hits the dead end of this electron chain and we
can't use that oxygen, but if we inhibit cytochrome c oxidase, we take the end off of that electron
chain, allow oxygen to flow all the way through, which means excess oxygen that we were going
to use but not able to can now be used.
So, it basically unlocks the ability to use more oxygen.
It's really powerful stuff.
So, what's really cool is Antler Farms has actually created a beetroot juice powder that
doesn't have the carbohydrates.
So, now we've got a powder that still gets the same effect in an organic form that isn't
going to have a bunch of by-products, and you're still going to have the antioxidant
effects because it's so pure.
So, when it comes down to actually being able to maximize the results with beetroot juice,
there's no need to juice a bunch of beets and spends hundreds of dollars on a juicer
and a bunch of beets when you can actually just get the raw unadulterated powder that
makes it nice and pure and nice and clean.
So, make sure you're keeping it locked in here with Antler Farms, so you can learn more
about how to maximize your life through revolutionary products.
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