Tart cherry for muscle recovery and athletic performance
- Erin Bianco
- May 4, 2020
- 2 min read
As an endurance athlete I am constantly looking for new ways to fuel and recover my body from the strenuous and long workouts. Last year my coach introduced us to tart cherry juice. I was intrigued to find out more ways to improve my athletic performance so decided to try it. After doing some research, I learned about the many benefits of tart cherry juice. I always believed ibuprofen was the only thing I could take to decrease soreness after a hard workout and race. I was wrong about that. Although ibuprofen is necessary in certain situations, tart cherry has changed the way I take care of my body during race season. After races I would drink tart cherry juice as a way to avoid soreness the next day and I saw a real difference. As a nordic skier, we do two races a weekend for 7 weeks. This can get hard on the body. The tart cherry juice helped lower the inflammation my legs would experience and helped the quality and duration of my sleep. I want to share a little bit more of the wonders of tart cherry.
Tart cherry not only helps with reducing strength loss and muscle recovery, but it also helps with the improvement of of endurance athletic performance (Gao). Ruirui Gao and Philip Chilibeck performed a study to look at this exact topic. They write about their findings in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition. Their objective for this study was to show that tart cherry improves muscle function and reduces muscle damage. They used randomized trials to test on endurance athletes whether injesting tart cherry changed their athletic performance. The results show that it does. Individuals who had the tart cherry performed better than their counterparts who did not injest tart cherry. "Tart cherry concentrate in juice or powdered form, ingested for 7 days to 1.5 hours before exercise performance testing significantly improved endurance exercise performance" (Gao).
So what is it about tart cherry that really helps improve athletes' endurance performance? Vitale KC approaches this exact topic in his article published in the National Center for Biotechnology Information. The most important components of tart cherry include their antioxidant and anti-inflammatory compounds. It increases recovery because tart cherry contains anthocyanin that has similar anti-inflammatory components as ibuprofen. Tart cherries target and clear free radicals in the body.
Another benefit to tart cherry is that it can boost levels of melatonin. A key component in getting quality sleep. As athletes know, sleep is critical for recovery. So if you are an athlete or just want your body to feel better after hard workouts, try this out!
Erin Bianco
works cited
Ruirui Gao & Philip D. Chilibeck (2020) Effect of Tart Cherry Concentrate on Endurance Exercise Performance: A Meta-analysis, Journal of the American College of Nutrition, DOI: 10.1080/07315724.2020.1713246
KC Vitale. (2017) Tart Cherry Juice in Athletes: A Literature Review and Commentary.National Center for Biotechnology Information 2017 Jul/Aug;16(4):230-239. doi: 10.1249/JSR.0000000000000385
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