What Is Montmorency Tart Cherry? Benefits for Endurance Athletes
If you have spent any time around endurance sport in the last few years, you will have heard someone mention tart cherry. It gets passed around club runs and chain gangs like a secret: drink the juice, take the capsules, chew the pastilles, and your legs will thank you tomorrow. But "tart cherry" is not one thing. The variety that appears in nearly all of the research is the Montmorency cherry, and the distinction matters more than most athletes realise.
This guide covers what Montmorency tart cherry actually is, what the evidence says it does for recovery, sleep and inflammation, and how to use it around hard training and racing. No miracle claims, just the numbers and a practical protocol you can copy.
What Exactly Is a Montmorency Cherry?
Montmorency is a variety of sour cherry (Prunus cerasus), grown mainly in the American Midwest, Canada and parts of Europe. Unlike the sweet cherries you buy in a punnet, Montmorency cherries are bright red, sharp-tasting and rarely eaten fresh. Almost the entire crop goes into juice concentrate, dried fruit, powders and supplements.
The reason athletes care is the fruit's chemistry. Montmorency cherries are unusually rich in anthocyanins — the deep red plant pigments that give the fruit its colour — along with other polyphenols like chlorogenic acid and quercetin. Anthocyanins are potent antioxidants and have well-documented anti-inflammatory effects. Montmorency cherries also contain small but measurable amounts of natural melatonin, the hormone that regulates your sleep-wake cycle. That combination — anthocyanins plus melatonin — is what makes this one fruit relevant to both recovery and sleep, which is why it keeps showing up in sports science literature.
Montmorency Tart Cherry Benefits: What the Research Shows
The most cited work on montmorency tart cherry benefits comes from marathon running. In a well-known London Marathon study, runners who took tart cherry juice for five days before, on the day of, and for two days after the race recovered isometric muscle strength significantly faster than the placebo group, and showed lower markers of inflammation (interleukin-6 and C-reactive protein) and reduced oxidative stress. Similar results have been repeated in cycling studies: after three days of simulated stage racing, riders supplementing with Montmorency concentrate showed lower lipid peroxidation and better maintained power output than controls.
The practical takeaways from roughly two decades of studies look like this:
- Less muscle soreness. Multiple trials report reduced DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) in the 24–48 hours after damaging exercise, particularly efforts with a heavy eccentric component like downhill running.
- Faster strength recovery. Studies consistently show a smaller drop in muscle function post-exercise and a quicker return to baseline — often a difference of several percentage points of strength retained at 24 hours.
- Lower inflammatory and oxidative markers. Reductions in IL-6, CRP and markers of oxidative stress are among the most repeatable findings.
- Possible performance support during heavy blocks. Some work suggests better repeated-day performance during stage races or back-to-back training days, likely a knock-on effect of recovering faster.
One honest caveat: not every study is positive, and the effect is clearest around hard, muscle-damaging exercise rather than easy aerobic sessions. There is also a sensible argument for not chronically blunting inflammation year-round, because some of that inflammatory signal drives training adaptation. That is why most researchers recommend using tart cherry strategically — around races and the heaviest blocks — rather than every day of the season.
Tart Cherry and Sleep: The Underrated Benefit
Recovery is not just what you eat; it is mostly what happens while you sleep. Montmorency cherries naturally contain melatonin and appear to increase the availability of tryptophan, the precursor to serotonin and melatonin. In controlled studies, tart cherry supplementation has increased total sleep time by up to 84 minutes in some populations and improved sleep efficiency in others.
For athletes, this matters twice over. First, sleep is when growth hormone release peaks and muscle repair actually happens. Second, hard evening training and pre-race nerves are notorious sleep-wreckers at precisely the moment you need sleep most. Taking tart cherry in the evening during a race week is a low-risk way to stack the odds in your favour.
How and When to Take Montmorency Tart Cherry
The research protocols are surprisingly consistent, which makes them easy to copy:
- Timing: start 4–5 days before your target event or hardest session, continue on the day itself, and keep going for 2–3 days afterwards. The loading phase matters — anthocyanin levels need to build up before the muscle damage happens.
- Dose: studies typically use the equivalent of 45–60 Montmorency cherries per day, usually split into a morning and evening serving. In juice terms that is roughly 30 ml of concentrate twice daily; powders and food formats state the equivalent on the label.
- Evening serving: if sleep is your priority, keep one serving within an hour or two of bed to make use of the melatonin content.
- When to skip it: during general base training, save your money and let normal adaptation do its job. Deploy it for race weeks, training camps and multi-day events.
Format is largely personal preference. Juice concentrate works but is heavy, perishable once opened, and not exactly pocket-friendly. Capsules are convenient but joyless. Chews and pastilles sit in the middle: shelf-stable, easy to dose, and pleasant enough that you will actually stay consistent — which, with a loading protocol, is the whole game.
What We Use at FTP Endurance Fuel
We built our Tart Cherry Energy Pastilles for exactly this protocol. Each pastille pairs fast-release carbohydrate with real Montmorency tart cherry, so the same product covers fuelling during a long session and the anthocyanin top-up afterwards. The 1kg bulk pack works out far cheaper per serving than bottled concentrate, and because they are individually chewable it is easy to hit a consistent morning-and-evening dose through race week without measuring anything.
If you have never tried tart cherry before and want to see whether it agrees with you before committing to a bulk bag, the Taster Pack is the sensible place to start — enough for a full pre-race loading protocol.
The Bottom Line
Montmorency tart cherry is one of the few recovery supplements with a genuinely respectable evidence base: repeatable reductions in soreness, faster strength recovery, lower inflammation, and a meaningful sleep benefit — all from a fruit rather than a lab. Used strategically around your biggest efforts, the montmorency tart cherry benefits are worth having, and the protocol is simple enough to start this week. If your next big event is on the calendar, work backwards five days, start your loading phase, and give your legs a fair chance to keep up with your ambition.
