Beetroot shows promise for muscle force in combat sports

Dietary nitrate from beetroot has become one of the most talked-about legal performance aids, yet most of the conversation has centred on endurance sport. Combat sports place very different demands on an athlete: short repeated bursts of maximal effort, sustained isometric grips and explosive striking. Studies testing beetroot in fighters have been accumulating, but the authors note that firm conclusions from the available investigations remained unclear. This review set out to pull those scattered trials together and ask whether nitrate from beetroot actually helps combat sports performance, whether taken as a one-off or over a longer period.

The reviewers systematically searched six databases, including PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science and the Cochrane Library, for randomised placebo-controlled studies of beetroot supplementation in combat sports athletes, with the search running up to 2 January 2023. Search terms related to beetroot and to combat sports were combined to catch every relevant trial. Nine studies met the inclusion criteria, and all were judged to be of good methodological quality using the Cochrane risk of bias tool. Seven of the nine tested acute supplementation around a single session, while the remaining two examined chronic supplementation.

Taken together, the trials suggest beetroot intake may be an effective tool for improving oxidative metabolism and muscle force production in combat sports athletes, covering both isokinetic force, produced through movement, and isometric force, produced while holding a position. The word may is doing real work here. The reviewers found the effects appeared to depend on the population studied, the duration of intake, the muscle group activated and the type of exercise performed. In other words, beetroot did not deliver a uniform benefit across every athlete and every test.

This review extends the dietary nitrate story beyond its endurance heartland into a family of sports built on strength, speed and repeated effort. It supports the idea that nitrate can influence muscle force and oxidative metabolism, though only within a small evidence base of nine trials. The authors flag two gaps that matter most: effects in female combat athletes are essentially unknown, and the field has yet to establish which dosing protocols and which specific exercise modalities benefit most. Until those questions are answered, this remains a promising direction rather than settled science.

If you box, grapple or compete in any combat discipline, beetroot is a supplement with genuine, if conditional, trial support behind it rather than pure marketing. The most defensible reading is that any benefit will vary with how it is taken, which muscles the sport stresses and what kind of effort is tested, so results in one athlete or one drill may not carry over to another. Women should note the evidence so far barely covers them. This is a reason to watch the research rather than treat beetroot as a guaranteed edge.