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International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, 2019, 29, 198-209 https://doi.org/10.1123/ijsnem.2018-0271 © 2019 Human Kinetics, Inc.

Nitrate enhances NO bioavailability via the NO3 − –nitrite–NO pathway, which plays an important role in the modulation of skeletal muscle function (Jones, 2014). This pathway augments exercise performance via an enhanced function of Type II muscle fibers (Jones et al., 2016a), a reduced ATP cost of muscle force production, an increased efficiency of mitochondrial respiration, increased blood flow to the muscle, and a decrease in blood flow to VO2 heterogeneities (Bailey et al., 2010).

Nitrate supplementation has been shown to promote improvements in exercise tasks that predominately stress the aerobic energy system, such as time to exhaustion (4–25% increased performance) and sport-specific events (1–3% increased performance) lasting <40 min (Jones, 2014; McMahon et al., 2017). In addition, nitrate supplementation is proposed to enhance Type II muscle fiber function (Bailey et al., 2015) resulting in the improvement (3–5%) of high-intensity exercise efforts (Thompson et al., 2015; Wylie et al., 2016). Current evidence is equivocal for such benefit to exercise tasks lasting 3 days) also appear beneficial to performance (Thompson et al., 2015, 2016).

There appears to be few side effects or limitations to nitrate supplementation other than the potential for minor gastrointestinal upset in some gut-sensitive athletes.