When and How Much Caffeine and Beet Root Juice Should I Consume For Maximum Effectiveness

Audio Transcript

Welcome to the Runners Connect Run To The Top Xtra Kick Podcast. Today’s question is from Crystal. Crystal says, “I listen to your awesome interview with Olympic team nutritionist, Dan Benardot in the Masters section. A couple of follow up questions: when should beet juice be consumed and how long before a hard run or a marathon, to be most effective? Likewise, how many milligrams of caffeine should I consume and when?

Crystal, these are some great questions and for those who don’t know, we have a program called Runners Connect Masters. It’s a program where we provide premium content, challenges and discounts to our masters members. It’s $9.95 a month and you can sign up at runnersconnect.net/pro, or at least check out what’s available. We have a 30-day Weight Loss Challenge, 20-day core challenge and we have weekly premium videos that go out. We’re going to be launching some seminar soon and so it’s an awesome product. We had Olympic team nutritionist come on, for the premium videos, and talk a little bit about nutritional aids that can help with running, and two of the nutritional aids that he mentioned were beetroot juice and caffeine. We’ll start with beet root juice.

There have been some studies that have shown that beet root juice can help improve running performance. The way we approach whether any type of supplements works or doesn’t work, is we go in and look at all of the available research about whether they work or don’t work. What happens is that with most supplements, you’ll find some studies that show that it works and others that show that it doesn’t work. Others show a minimal kind of improvement, where the researchers will say it’s unclear, but possible that it will have an effect. What we like to do is, we like to combine all that research and ensure that at least 70-75% of the studies show that there’s some potential performance advantage there, to taking that supplement.

That’s the case with beet root juice. There are some studies that show that there was no effect on performance, but there are a lot more that show that there is, at least a positive effect. I don’t know what the exact number is but it definitely [00:03:28] for our researching team to know that we should publish it and recommended it as a supplement. The other thing that we look for, when we recommend supplements is, what is the risk-reward benefit there? If there’s a potential supplement that maybe, 60% percent of research studies show that there could be a benefit, but there’s a chance that it could be harmful. For example, a lot of research studies, when you’re talking about supplements, involve taking fairly high doses of whatever particular stimulator supplement that you’re talking about and sometimes that can be dangerous to take that much.

For example, if you’re looking at a vitamin and the vitamins not water soluble, it’s possible for that vitamin to become toxic in your body. We don’t necessarily want to recommend it, if there’s no real benefit or if there’s also some risk. With beetroot juice, the research shows that more than likely, it’s going to help your performance and there’s very little potential for it to harm you, unless you have kidney issues. If that’s the case, the beetroot juice is high and there are chemicals that can crystalize in the kidney, which can obviously cause problems if you’ve had past kidney problems. Finally, consult your doctor. We look at the research that’s available and we’re highly scientific but we’re not doctors. We don’t know your particular medical situation, so before taking any supplement, please make sure to consult with your physician.

The second thing that I’ll say about supplements is that they’re not going to make you drop 30 minutes in your marathon time, or do some ungodly thing to your performance, unless they’re illegal, like steroids EPO or something like that. What we’re talking about here, are probably small potential boosts to your performance, about 1-3% potential boost to your performance. They are the icing on the cake. The really important parts are the training: getting your training right, doing the right type of training, getting in the volume, getting in the workouts, and staying healthy. Those are the foundations. That is the bedrock that’s going to allow you to become a better, injury-free runner. The supplements are the little things that you can do, to get that 1-4% performance advantage especially on race day. Keep in mind that none of the supplements that we will ever talk about, are something that will dramatically improve your performance, if you’re not already working hard. Again, beetroot juice can help. The studies vary and one study in particular saw roughly a 15% boost in performance in a time trial to exhaustion. There are definitely some performance benefits there.

Back to Crystal’s question. We were talking about, what type of beetroot juice and how long it should be consumed before. When we looked at the research, and what we’ve learned especially from the team doctor for the Olympics is that, beetroot juice typically remains effective for about 12 hours. We recommend consuming it about two to five hours before your workout or marathon or whatever race that you’re doing. That gives you ample time to settle in there and also because you have to drink it, it could potentially mess up your stomach. You just want to make sure that you’re not drinking it so close to your race.

Remember too that with supplements, you’ll want to test them out before the race day. The first time you use beetroot juice should not be the day of the marathon. You should be using it a couple of times during training to see how your body reacts to it. Assuming everything goes well and there are no side effects, you can go ahead and use it on race day. So keep that in mind for pretty much any supplement. The type of beetroot juice that’s going to work best are concentrated forms, at least the research studies show, usually the people who are taking about 17 ounces of beetroot juice. That’s a lot to drink, especially before a marathon. Even if it’s only two to three hours before, putting down 17 ounces of fluid can be a little bit difficult, but there are some concentrated forms. I think they are sold in 70 ml shots that contain roughly the amount of 16 ounces of beetroot juice.

So there’s some concentrated forms that you can get that you don’t have to drink the entire volume of fluid. What you want to avoid is supplements that just contain the beetroot ingredients because they’re not the same thing as the actual ingredients in the beet, so you can eat real beets or you can drink the beetroot juice, but don’t go with a supplement that just has the nitrates. That isn’t going to be absorbed by the body very well and it’s not going to work. That’s for the beet root juice. Two to three hours before, try to get about 16 or 17 ounces of the beetroot juice or you can do it in a concentrated form, which are about 300 ml or so of concentrate, so try to get into that dosage.

Moving on to caffeine. Caffeine is probably one of the most highly studied supplements in the world, because it’s in a lot of the stuff, obviously, coffee being the biggest one. It’s also one of the ones that has probably the most scientific research backing it up. Like beetroot juice, there are some studies that show very little or negligible performance advantage from taking caffeine, but for the most part, most of the studies show that caffeine is going to benefit your performance. There’s very little chance that caffeine is going to have a negative side effect for you. Some people obviously are very sensitive to it but it’s highly unlikely that caffeine will cause any health issues. You should consult your physician but caffeine is not dangerous.

It is a supplement that we recommend using if you’re into using supplements. When you’re taking caffeine, a lot of it is going to depend on your sensitivity. If you’re drinking two or three cups of coffee a day already, that isn’t going to affect you as much. What we’re talking about, is anywhere from 120-400 mgs of caffeine. To give you a reference, a typical cup of coffee contains about 120 mgs of caffeine and you can see there that that’s quite a range. If you’re somebody that’s caffeine sensitive, you probably want to stick to 120 mgs, which is like your usual cup of coffee. If you’re a habitual caffeine drinker, you can probably get up to 3-4 mgs of caffeine. You want to start this protocol about an hour before the race starts, because research shows that the amount of caffeine in the blood, peaks around about an hour and that’s going to sustain you for a couple of hours.

So it’s a good way to ensure that the caffeine is right where it wants to be, when you start and it will help you out in those first few miles. You can also choose to take another dose of caffeine somewhere between 16 and 20 miles. This is going to give you another jolt and kind of wake you up a little bit. A lot of times you’re going to take caffeine with a gel; some gels contain caffeine. Also, the sugar from that gel is going to go directly to the brain and that is going to stimulate your senses, and when you add caffeine to that, it’s going to stimulate your senses further. It will make sure that the caffeine in your blood system is at its peak level , allowing you to reap the performance and advantages as best as you can.

Again, take anywhere from 120 to 400 mg of caffeine an hour before your race, and then if you choose, you can take 120-300 mgs again, in the middle of your race. You can certainly take less than that, especially if you’re using it in gel form and that will be enough. Your caffeine levels are going to be pretty high already so you don’t need a huge shot but that’s just some of the recommendations. You also need to take note of your sensitivity and adjust to it. If you’re somebody that doesn’t do caffeine often, you’ll want to be on the lower range and if you’re somebody that drinks caffeine habitually, you’ll want to go on the higher end. Remember that you shouldn’t take caffeine the first time during your race. That can lead to some awful results and you want to make sure that on race day, you have everything in place as you’d like it to be.

Crystal, thank you so much for the question. I really appreciate it. If you want to get your own question answered on the podcast, head on to runnersconnect.net/daily and click the button there to record your voicemail. If you’re interested in starting a free two week trial of our custom training plans and our coaching support, head to runnersconnect.net/train and we’ll go ahead and get started for you.

Thanks again guys and have a great day.