Benefits of tart cherry juice post-exercise

Sports & Exercise Sportswiki
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There are a lot of benefits to using tart cherry juice after workouts to help with recovery.

Benefits include reducing pain and inflammation. Many people use nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). However using too much of them can be harmful. Drinking tart cherry juice or cherry supplements can reduce inflammation, swelling, and pain with none of the risk.

There are a lot of nutrients in it. An 8 ounce serving of tart cherry juice has:

  • Vitamin A - 62% of Recommended Daily Intake (RDI)
  • Vitamin C - 40% of RDI
  • Manganese - 14% of RDI
  • Potassium - 12% of RDI
  • Copper - 12% of RDI
  • Vitamin K - 7% of RDI

All the other benefits aside, the reduction in muscle soreness is great.

Tart cherries have sour-sweet flavor that some may not like by itself. But I use one that is sweetened with apple juice, and it tastes great. The one I use also has 30 grams of quick carbs in an 8 ounce serving, which is also very useful following exercise.

Trust me on this, it is good stuff.

Here are several write-ups on it.

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Our son takes tart cherry juice to help reduce arthritis symptoms in his hips.

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What about eating tart cherries? I’ve bought unsweetened ones from nuts.com before, and I think of them sort of like nature’s sour patch kids.

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You can eat them and get the same benefit. But…you’d have to eat a lot!

Eating them also gives you the antioxidants / anti-inflammatories / anthocyanins contained in the juice, but the benefit of the juice is that it is much more concentrated.

Some of the juice products contain the equivalent of 500 cherries in only 8 ounces!

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Good luck to your GI tract after 500 dried cherries…

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