Vitamin K is often regarded as a nutrient for improving heart health, lowering cancer risk, and increasing bone density, but it also appears to improve fitness even in healthy athletes. Like most nutrients, it seems to have quite versatile roles.
In this small study, 26 trained male and female athletes were administered placebo or vitamin K2 supplements for eight weeks while they maintained their regular exercise routines. At the beginning of the study and after eight weeks, each person completed a fitness test on an exercise machine designed to quantify their physical work load, oxygen consumption, respiratory rate, cardiac output, and heart rate.
Vitamin K2 supplementation was associated with a 12% increase in cardiac output (volume of blood that the heart is capable of pumping per beat). The authors suggest that vitamin K2, which has previously been shown to play a role in energy metabolism (especially in tissues with high energy requirements such as skeletal muscle and heart) might be considered in healthy athletes to improve performance.
For more details on the cited paper, click here for a link to the abstract, “Oral Consumption of Vitamin K2 for 8 Weeks Associated With Increased Maximal Cardiac Output During Exercise,” published in the July 2017 issue of Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine.
