Illinois Basketball Reveals Their Secret Weapon. Beets

A championship team looks for every advantage they can get.  

First of all, let's get this out of the way.

Dwight would be proud.

So, did you know that beet juice can help muscle recovery after a workout? I wanted to check it out so I did some light googling. According to the website nutraingredients.com, which I would rate at about a C for legitimacy. (It has A LOT of ads for nutrition supplements. Of course, it would tell you that some things would help muscle recovery) it does.

They're quoting a journal called Nutrients. Now they don't provide a link in the article, suspicious, but when you google "Nutrients Journal" it will lead you to this website, that claims to be peer-reviewed. I would give this site a B for legitimacy just because there are a lot fewer ads.

Back to the original article.

They claim that according to the journal Nutrients that:

Participants consuming beetroot juice had countermovement jump heights 7.6% higher than the placebo group 72 hours after the sprint test, and their reactive strength index was higher than the placebo group at all points.

Good enough for me. But how does it taste?

247Sports.com - "It's not really good, but we don't worry about how they taste, we worry about the end results of what it's doing for us"

The above quote is from sophomore center Kofi Cockburn. Kofi, as long as the end result is you guys cutting down on the turnovers and playing a full 40-minute game, I don't care how it tastes.

But apparently, it is really bad.

Here's a video of them taking down a round of beet shots:

You can check out for yourself if the shots work. The Illini take have a top-10 opponent in Iowa coming to town Friday night. Good luck and remember to take your vitamins.