Mohamed Salah and the Running Economy of an Elite Endurance-Sprinter

The Athlete in One Paragraph

Mohamed Salah Hamed Mahrous Ghaly (b. 1992, Nagrig, Egypt) is a forward for Liverpool FC and the Egypt national team. Listed at 1.75 m and ~71 kg, he has averaged 14–15 km of total covered distance per match across multiple Premier League seasons — high for an attacker — combined with consistent goal-and-assist contribution into his thirties. The interesting case for sport science is the durability profile: a player whose mechanical demand looks like a winger’s (repeated sprints, accelerations, decelerations) but whose physiological signature reads like an endurance athlete’s. The variable underneath that combination is running economy — how much oxygen the body costs to sustain a given submaximal velocity.

The Physiology — what running economy actually is

For an endurance athlete, performance is not predicted by VO₂max alone. Two runners with identical VO₂max can perform very differently if one of them costs less oxygen per kilometre at the same submaximal pace. That second variable is running economy (RE) — the steady-state oxygen consumption at a given velocity, usually expressed as ml O₂ · kg⁻¹ · km⁻¹ [1, 3].

Joyner and Coyle’s framework for endurance performance includes three factors: VO₂max (the ceiling), lactate threshold (how high a fraction of that ceiling can be sustained), and RE (how efficiently submaximal speed is converted into oxygen demand) [3]. The athlete who improves any one of the three improves performance. The athlete who improves all three — and the elites do — gains the multiplicative effect.

Saunders and colleagues identified the determinants of RE in trained runners: stride mechanics (vertical oscillation, ground contact pattern), tendon stiffness (especially Achilles), neuromuscular efficiency, body mass distribution, and accumulated training history [1]. RE is not fixed at maturity; it improves over years of consistent stimulus, which is one reason elite endurance athletes peak in their late twenties or early thirties.

In football, the demand profile is not a single steady-state effort but a stochastic mix: walking, jogging, high-intensity running (>19.8 km/h), and sprinting (>25 km/h), arranged in roughly 4–6 second bursts [2, 5]. Bangsbo and colleagues reported that elite players cover 10–13 km per match at varying intensities, with ~150–250 high-intensity actions, but the limiting factor for late-match performance is recovery between those bursts — and recovery is itself an aerobic process [2]. The better the athlete’s RE, the cheaper the submaximal recovery work between sprints, and the more sprint capacity remains in the tank for the 80th minute.

The Case — Salah’s repeated-effort signature

Salah’s profile reads physiologically as a hybrid: enough Vmax to compete with the league’s fastest defenders, high RE to repeat high-intensity efforts late in the match, and a body mass low enough to keep mass-specific oxygen cost favourable. At 71 kg, a forward who weighs 4–5 kg less than a typical centre-forward carries 5–7% less mass to oxygenate per stride, which compounds across thousands of strides per match.

Buchheit and Laursen’s HIIT review formalised the principle that aerobic capacity and sprint capacity are not opposed in football — they are interdependent [4]. The athlete with high RE recovers faster between sprints; the athlete who recovers faster between sprints can train more sprints; the athlete who trains more sprints develops higher sprint capacity. The combination compounds. Salah’s relatively rare profile — sustained sprint output across a 90-minute window, week after week — is consistent with an aerobic system that allows recovery to be cheap.

The eccentric-loading dimension also matters: deceleration phases (>−3 m/s²) before a directional change generate higher peak loads than the matching acceleration. A player who decelerates well repeatedly is one whose tendon and muscle architecture absorbs energy efficiently — itself a function of the long-term stimulus pattern [1, 5]. Salah’s career durability (rare hamstring/soft-tissue absences relative to peer wingers) is descriptively consistent with that picture, though no peer-reviewed study isolates his specific mechanical profile.

Match-context note: Salah’s reported total covered distance in Premier League matches sits at ~14 km (Match data: SofaScore), with high-intensity distance ~2.5 km — both at the upper bound for forwards. The discriminator is consistency: the same numbers in week 35 of the season as in week 5.

What This Means for the Reader

For an amateur or developing endurance athlete — runner or footballer — the takeaway is that VO₂max is not the whole picture. A 12-month block focused on accumulating low-intensity continuous training and tempo work will improve RE more than another block of VO₂max intervals on top of an already-high ceiling [1, 3]. The cheapest training adaptation in endurance is often the most boring one.

For team-sport athletes, the practical implication is that aerobic conditioning is not a “base-building” pre-season exercise that disappears in-season. The aerobic system is the recovery system between sprints. Lose it across the season and late-match performance degrades — not because top-end sprint speed declines, but because the recovery between top-end sprints becomes slower and the next sprint is run from incomplete restoration of phosphocreatine and oxygen stores [2, 4].

The diagnostic question for the athlete: how do my fifth, sixth, and seventh sprint times compare with my first? If the drop-off is large, the gap is in aerobic capacity, not in maximal speed.

References

1. Saunders PU, Pyne DB, Telford RD, Hawley JA. (2004). Factors affecting running economy in trained distance runners. Sports Medicine, 34(7): 465–485. doi:10.2165/00007256-200434070-00005
2. Bangsbo J, Mohr M, Krustrup P. (2006). Physical and metabolic demands of training and match-play in the elite football player. Journal of Sports Sciences, 24(7): 665–674. doi:10.1080/02640410500482529
3. Joyner MJ, Coyle EF. (2008). Endurance exercise performance: the physiology of champions. The Journal of Physiology, 586(1): 35–44. doi:10.1113/jphysiol.2007.143834
4. Buchheit M, Laursen PB. (2013). High-intensity interval training, solutions to the programming puzzle. Sports Medicine, 43(5): 313–338. doi:10.1007/s40279-013-0029-x
5. Stølen T, Chamari K, Castagna C, Wisløff U. (2005). Physiology of soccer: an update. Sports Medicine, 35(6): 501–536. doi:10.2165/00007256-200535060-00004

Match-context data (descriptive only): SofaScore.