Does Beet Powder Improve Endurance? Dr. John Ivy on Humann’s Clinical Study.

Dr. John Ivy, PhD, the Teresa Lozano Long Endowed Chair Emeritus at the University of Texas, is a distinguished exercise physiologist and the President of Humann’s Science Advisory Board, where he applies decades of pioneering research to elevate the company’s evidence-based performance nutrition. In this short video he walks through what Humann found when it put its beetroot formula in front of trained cyclists. 

The trial he describes was randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled, with each rider completing the protocol on both the supplement and a placebo, so every participant served as his own control. Riders went 18% longer before exhaustion, completed roughly one additional high-intensity interval, and raised lactate threshold power 7.2% against placebo. Muscle oxygen saturation also recovered faster between intervals, which is the mechanism behind what Dr. Ivy describes as better blood flow during the recovery phase. The full trial is published open-access in Current Research in Physiology, and there is a plain-language walkthrough in our summary of the HIIT cycling study. 

The product Dr. Ivy refers to as “SuperBeets Sport” is sold today as Endurance Beet Powder. It has carried three names — BeetElite, then SuperBeets Sport, now Endurance — while the patented nitric oxide technology and beetroot formula behind the research has stayed the same. 

Transcript 

So we have studied SuperBeet Sports as we do most of our Humann products. And we found that in, with highly trained cyclists doing intervals where they would exercise, and we provided SuperBeets Sports forty-five minutes prior to the exercise or a placebo. What we found was is that the individuals, when they were on the SuperBeet Sports product, could exercise for a significantly longer period of time. They could do more work, and they could pedal at a higher cadence rate and sustain that for a longer period of time. We also found that on SuperBeet Sports, that the lactate threshold was raised about 8% in these athletes, which helped account for the improvement in performance. We also looked at blood flow in the muscles, and what we found was is that when on SuperBeet Sports, during the exercise intensity or during the high-intensity exercise, blood flow was better to the muscles. There was less constriction of blood flow. And during recovery period, blood flow increased dramatically, faster than it did when not on the SuperBeets, providing more oxygen and a faster recovery during the low-intensity part of the exercise.