Tart cherry
Evidence: moderate
Montmorency tart cherry has a moderate, real effect on the recovery of muscle strength and power after strenuous exercise, a weaker effect on soreness, and a small endurance signal. Because its active anthocyanins are antioxidants, it carries the same adaptation-blunting concern as other antioxidant supplements, so timing matters.
Not medical advice
This is a general knowledge base, not medical or dietary advice. If you are injured, unwell or weighing up a supplement or a change to your diet, speak to a doctor, physiotherapist or registered dietitian who knows your situation.
Tart cherry, usually the Montmorency variety taken as a concentrate or powder, is one of the few recovery supplements with more than a mechanistic story behind it. Its effect is carried by anthocyanins, the polyphenol pigments that give the fruit its colour, which act as antioxidants and dampen inflammation.
What the evidence shows
The best-supported use is recovery rather than performance. A scoping review of tart cherry in healthy adults found a moderate benefit for the recovery of muscle strength and power after strenuous exercise, a smaller and less consistent effect on muscle soreness, and more variable effects on performance (tart cherry scoping review 2026). That profile, real for the objective recovery of force but weaker for how sore you feel, mirrors what the wider recovery literature tends to show and separates a measurable effect from a felt one, the distinction delayed-onset muscle soreness turns on.
There is also a direct performance signal, though a smaller one. A meta-analysis of 10 trials in mostly young trained cyclists, runners and triathletes found that tart cherry concentrate, taken over about a week up to 1.5 hours before exercise, gave a small but significant improvement in endurance performance, attributed to the anthocyanins’ anti-inflammatory action and to better blood flow through raised nitric oxide (Gao & Chilibeck 2020). The trials are small, the pooled female sample smaller still, and much of the public messaging around this literature is promoted by the cherry industry, so the funding-and-promotion scrutiny applies.
The antioxidant caveat
The mechanism that helps is the same one that raises a flag. High-dose antioxidant supplements can blunt the training adaptation that inflammation and oxidative stress help to drive, which is why routine vitamin C and E supplementation is discouraged during adaptation-focused training. Tart cherry is an antioxidant load by another name, so the sensible reading is to treat it the same way: useful for damage limitation when the goal is to recover fast between efforts, such as a congested race schedule or a multi-day event, and better left off during base and build phases when the adaptation is the point.
The verdict
Tart cherry is a genuine, modest recovery aid, better evidenced than most of the recovery shelf, and its clearest value is speeding the return of strength and power when races or hard sessions come close together. It is not an everyday supplement, and the antioxidant-blunting caveat means using it around competition rather than through training blocks. As with all of this, it sits well behind sleep, fuelling and the basics in what actually drives recovery.