 Are you ready for a wild ride? One of the fundamental gospels of sports physiology just got turned on its head. Every exercise physiology textbook in the world just got thrown out the window and all because of beat juice. When athletes train, the reason they get better is they improve oxygen delivery to their muscles. Bodies in their lungs allow them to take bigger breaths, for example. Strengthening of the heart boosts cardiac output and blood flow. Your body may even start making more red blood cells to boost the oxygen carrying capacity of the blood. But the energy ultimately derived from that oxygen remains the same. X amount of oxygen gets you X amount of work, period, no matter who you are. As an analogy on the same gasoline, a Lamborghini goes faster than some lemon. But not because the chemistry of gasoline combustion is different in the sports car, it's just a more powerful engine. Similarly, we may have bigger muscles. We may be able to get more oxygen to those muscles quicker. But the fundamental energy that can be extracted from oxygen remains the same. Or so we thought. Researchers put eight guys on bikes and measured their oxygen consumption before and after a few days sipping two cups of beet juice. Before this series of experiments, there was no known drug, substance, steroid, intervention, nothing, that could actually increase energy extraction from oxygen. Yet this is what they found. The open ovals are the placebo, and the filled are the beet root group. After a couple cups of beet juice, they could do the exact same amount of work with less oxygen. They could do the exact same work with 19% less oxygen. Then when they ramped up the bike for an intense bout of what they called severe cycling, time to exhaustion was extended from 9 minutes 43 seconds to 11 minutes 15. Greater endurance with less oxygen in the beet group. 16% improvement in their time was only about four-fifths the oxygen requirement. In short, the beet juice made their body's energy production significantly more efficient.