A few months before his 30th birthday, Mohamed Salah was asked in an interview how he felt about reaching an age when most footballers are typically considered to be past their peak.
“I didn’t think about the fact I’m going to turn 30,” he told Four Four Two magazine. “I ask some players and they say it’s a different feeling when you turn 30, but I’m feeling fine. I’m enjoying life, I’m enjoying football — it doesn’t matter how old you are now.”
For most of last season, the Premier League’s top scorer (29 goals) and provider of most assists (18) proved his point. He turned 33 in June, but Salah’s performances were crucial in propelling Liverpool to the title.
Those displays earned Salah a new two-year contract — despite Liverpool owners Fenway Sports Group’s reluctance to hand out large deals of over 12 months to players in their thirties — and the unstinting respect of his peers. Last night, four days after scoring his first goal of the new campaign against Bournemouth, he became the first three-time winner of the Professional Footballers’ Association Players’ Player of the Year award — the trophy voted for by players in England.
“What Mo is doing season in, season out is ridiculous. It’s mind-blowing,” said Daniel Sturridge, once a team-mate of Salah’s, on Sky Sports. Former Liverpool defender Jamie Carragher called it an “all-time season”, placing Salah behind only Thierry Henry for Premier League attackers.
At an age when most top players are starting to show signs of declining, how is it that Salah has put his foot on the gas and accelerated into a whole new dimension?
At Roma, where he signed permanently from Chelsea in 2016 after impressing on loan, Salah began to refine the preparation and recovery regimen that has become central to his success.
In a 2022 interview with L’Equipe, he said it was in Italy that he began “looking for those details” that would help him “recover well and feel toned match after a match”. He bought cardio and weights machines and built a private practice pitch in his garden where he could work on his shooting with a coach.
In the book Chasing Salah, author Simon Hughes details a gruelling pre-season training camp in Evian, southern France, run by Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp in 2018. While club masseurs and physios were kept busy dealing with his team-mates’ pulls and strains, Salah’s only demands were around preparation and ensuring his body was ready for whatever Klopp had to throw at him the following day. In Hughes’ book, someone who had worked with Salah on his recovery says he is “a machine… a freak”.
Though the players had three training sessions per day to complete in Evian, Salah would start and end with visits to the gym, building on a habit he had started at Chelsea. Salah had been a gym user since his teenage years, but at Chelsea it became something of a sanctuary, as well as a place to make improvements: “I used to go every day because I knew I would not play,” he told GQ magazine in 2022. He also felt many of his team-mates at the club were bigger than him and that his speed would need to be supplemented by more strength if he was to survive in the Premier League.
By the time Salah returned to England in 2017, gym work was fully ingrained in his life, inside and outside the club environment. In Chasing Salah, Hughes writes that while other players arriving early at Liverpool’s headquarters would fill time before training by playing pool, Salah was in the gym, working on his abdominal and rotational strength.
Though his visible abdominal muscles might be the aspect of his physique considered most impressive (especially by those of us who’ve never seen one ab, never mind six), they are largely a by-product of good nutrition and his genetics. It is the deeper core stability and ability to twist his body as he moves at speed that is more important.
Mohamed Salah’s physique has long been considered a sign of his rare fitness (Andrew Powell/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)
“He’ll be working on rotational strength because he will have identified it as something important to his game”, says Dr Ben Rosenblatt, who spent seven years as England men’s lead physical performance coach before launching 292 Performance, providing “high performers” with their own support team. “For Salah, that’s holding players off and manoeuvring between small spaces.”
Allied to this performance aspect, Rosenblatt says Salah’s focus on rotational strength is likely based on the knowledge he has garnered about his own body and what it needs to remain resilient to the demands of elite football.
“There might be something within his injury history that says to him, ‘I need to have a really strong trunk and be really powerful in rotational domains’,” Rosenblatt adds. “He’s identified something important both to his game and to his injury history that he consistently commits work to. That’s one of the keys to keeping players robust and resilient later into their career.”
Outside of the training ground, Salah remains devoted to doing the work. Two rooms of the house he shares with wife Magi and their two daughters, Makka and Kayan, are filled with gym equipment, including free weights, a treadmill, an exercise bike, a small Pilates reformer machine and fixed resistance machines.
He has the facility to do cryotherapy — extreme cold therapy at temperatures below minus 80C (-112F) — which can accelerate muscle recovery after exercise by reducing soreness and inflammation. There is also a hyperbaric chamber in which he can breathe pure oxygen at an air pressure two or three times higher than normal, potentially promoting muscle recovery and endurance, according to some studies.
Salah has joked that his house looks more like a hospital. Once his children are in bed, he often heads to his home gym to work on something specific, such as flexibility or mobility. “My wife says I spend more time with my machines than with her,” he told L’Equipe.
Salah is a self-confessed gym bunny (Andrew Powell/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)
It clearly works. Salah started all of Liverpool’s Premier League games last season and that’s not unusual for him. Until the hamstring tear he picked up on Africa Cup of Nations duty in January 2024, he had missed just 10 Premier League games across six and a half seasons at Anfield — a remarkable record for a player who is invariably on the receiving end of some robust attention from opposition defenders.
Various factors, including genetics, play a role, says Luke Anthony, the clinical director at sports-injury centre GoPerform who has worked with clubs including Watford, Reading and Norwich City. “We know that with some injuries, like anterior cruciate ligament injuries, there seems to be a certain predisposition for people to have that type of injury.”
Injury history is another big determinant of a player’s future robustness. “So once you’ve had one injury, whether it be a hamstring, thigh or knee injury, you are more likely to have that injury again compared to someone who hasn’t had that injury”, says Anthony. “If you pick up injuries in the early part of your career, it might heal well, but you carry that injury risk on your profile going forward.”
There is also an element of luck and circumstance involved, including the day-to-day component of what happens at a club and how a manager manages training loads.
Salah is also a Pilates devotee, and has stationed a Pilates reformer among the squat rack, weight stacks and treadmill in his home gym. “When you’re playing any sport, it takes movement away from you,” explains Rosenblatt. “A footballer might lose range around their ankle, hip or thoracic spine (the middle section) and Pilates will help restore that.”
A reformer machine also challenges the body in ways it is not accustomed to, so requires very high levels of self-awareness in the body to complete it well. “There’s an opportunity there to check in with your body and work out what’s feeling tight, where you’ve lost motion or where you might need more support,” says Rosenblatt. “You also need extreme levels of precision and body control to do that type of work well. That level of body control and awareness is really important for any athlete, especially one who is trying to sustain their career.”
Alongside Pilates, Salah also practises yoga. After scoring against Chelsea during the 2018-19 season, he celebrated by executing “tree pose” (standing on one leg with the sole of the other foot placed on the inner thigh of the standing leg and raising your arms overhead), which requires excellent balance, focus and stability.
Salah’s tree pose goal celebration against Chelsea in 2019 (Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images)
“I am a yoga man!” Salah exclaimed during a post-match interview, adding his name to a growing list of players who extol the virtues of the discipline for helping improve flexibility and core strength, both of which are important in protecting against injuries.
It has also helped Salah control his mental and emotional state. In yoga routines, focus is often placed on the breath and the ability to breathe from the stomach rather than the chest, helping calm the nervous system.
Rosenblatt introduced breathwork to the England team in 2020 after seeing how drained the players were following a penalty shootout victory over Colombia in the last 16 of the 2018 World Cup. “Everyone was smashed,” he recalls, “not necessarily physically. I’d never really seen it before but emotionally, psychologically, they were completely gone.
“We recognised that if we wanted to take the next step, that was something we’d have to recover from. If you want to be successful, the demands are only going to keep on increasing and there’s only so much you can do to condition them for that. You have to offset it in some way, shape or form.”
Breathwork can help stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system, providing an essential counterbalance to the sympathetic nervous system (your fight or flight response) in which players can too often find themselves as they constantly push to perform at their best.
“Emotional regulation and management are critical for anyone, let alone someone trying to perform under extreme levels of pressure repeatedly,” says Rosenblatt.
While in Rome, Salah also read about Olympic gold-medal-winning swimmer Michael Phelps using meditation and visualisation to improve his performances. From then on, Salah started incorporating such training techniques into his daily routine, spending a few minutes after waking each morning closing his eyes and imagining himself in different scoring positions. He would combine this with researching goalkeepers he was coming up against in games.
“His robustness is one of the factors behind him consistently producing the form he has,” says Dr James Malone, a sports scientist who has worked in the Premier League, including at Liverpool between 2010 and 2013.
While he does point to Salah’s low centre of gravity, “well-conditioned” physique and recovery work as being part of that robustness, Malone also says it can be attributed to the way he plays. “He’s very selective with his movement,” he adds. “It’s similar to Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi; they do run and they are intense when they run but they’re very selective when they engage with certain actions.
“For example, you won’t see Salah running around putting in sliding tackles. He’ll typically jump out of the way of things. In that way, he protects himself in games and then when the ball comes and he engages in the attack, he comes alive and starts to do his high-intensity movement.”
Salah told L’Equipe about how he will “analyse (an opponent’s) posture to anticipate their intervention”, with his speed and mobility work giving him a head start.
But while that approach has long been part of Salah’s game, the 2024-25 campaign saw a shift in the way he has been deployed. He is making fewer off-ball runs than ever, using the seven seasons of available data from SkillCorner.
Not only is he making fewer runs, but he is also accelerating less. His high-intensity accelerations (runs exceeding 3m/s²) have dropped from 10.97 per game in 2023-24 to 8.95 last season. Yet this is not representative of a sudden physical decline, but rather a tactical realignment from the new manager. They have certainly not affected his productivity.
Rather than diminishing his impact, these changes have made him even more effective. He is choosing his moments more selectively, and his runs are leading to more shots and goals than ever before. Salah generated almost 2.5 shots per game from his off-ball movement last season, the highest in the data available since 2018-19, despite moving less frequently.
The other notable change in Salah’s movement last season was where his off-ball runs began. Under Slot, Salah’s running patterns mimicked more traditional wing-play patterns, in contrast to the advanced inside-forward role he occupied in Klopp’s system.
With this shift, Salah is now starting his runs from deeper positions. His share of runs starting in advanced areas has declined significantly, dropping from 56 per cent in 2019-20 to 44 per cent last season.
By shifting his starting position, Salah is operating with more space in front of him, giving him a clearer runway to build speed before engaging defenders.
From 2018-19 onwards, Salah has started his runs progressively further from the nearest defender, a trend that could be as much about defensive adaptations as it is about his own movement.
Opposition defenders may now be wary of pressing too tightly, instead allowing themselves more time to react to his devastating bursts forward. Whether a deliberate strategy from Liverpool or a reactionary measure from opponents, the increased distance between Salah and his marker gives him more time to accelerate into space.
This extra space has preserved his effectiveness and allowed him to reach even greater speeds. His peak sprint velocity last season of 31.1 km/h is his highest on record, showing that while his frequency of high-intensity accelerations has declined, his ability to hit top-end remains undiminished.
Nutrition is another cornerstone, and one that Salah places so much importance on that he has been known to pay close attention to how his team-mates are eating, too.
In pre-season before the 2021-22 season, he spotted Liverpool youngster Harvey Elliott with two pieces of white bread on his plate and advised him to halve his intake. “My breakfast is mainly bread with beans or avocado,” Elliott told The Times in 2022. “Now I have changed it to brown bread, which is a lot healthier.”
In a lighthearted interview with Men in Blazers last year, Salah was asked by the host how he might get his kind of abdominal muscles. “You need to cut bread, or at least have gluten-free bread,” Salah replied. “Less dairy, don’t eat cheese that much and stay in the green stuff… and cut out the sugar, as well.”
Salah has listed broccoli, sweet potatoes, fish, chicken and salad as his favoured foods, and sushi when he eats out. He allows himself pizza once a month, loves burgers but hardly ever eats them and allows himself a koshari (a dish made with pasta, rice, lentils, chickpeas, and spices) whenever he returns to Egypt.
Salah is very careful over what he eats (Andrew Powell/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)
Alcohol never comes into the equation as Salah, a practising Muslim, is teetotal — something Klopp once hailed as part of the reason he and then-team-mate Sadio Mane could recover so swiftly from playing seven matches in the 2022 AFCON.
Dr Rob Naughton, a performance nutritionist who has worked with clubs and privately with international players on behalf of Intra Performance Group, explains that carbohydrates are the key fuel for footballers but that it’s important that intake is periodised. “They’ll have low training days where carbohydrate demands are low but then when you’re building up for a game, you need to bring it up,” he says. “That’s a way of helping players to maintain an optimal body composition while also ensuring they are fuelling their match demands.”
Salah might choose alternative sources of carbohydrates to bread but Naughton says that it’s important that each player finds what works best for them.
“One of the clubs I work with provides gluten-free pasta. When eating larger amounts of wheat-based pasta (as they might the day before a game), some players will bloat a bit and we’ve found that we get this symptom less frequently when choosing a gluten-free option.”
Salah’s performances last season were an accumulation of many factors, both on and off the pitch. The thread that connects them all is his willingness and desire to do everything he can to perform at his best, no matter what his age.
“Whether it’s breathwork, visualisation, meditation, pilates, yoga, core training, to do that stuff every day, day in, day out, requires an enormous amount of discipline, effort and consistency,” says Rosenblatt. “And that’s not even talking about the football, too!”
But can Salah really keep improving as he hits his mid-thirties? Rosenblatt describes working with a player who has recently hit a personal best in their peak speed at the age of 33, and says it isn’t all that unusual.
“I’ve worked with other athletes who are peaking in their power and explosive outputs at later stages of their careers — it’s simply because they’ve invested effort and energy into it,” he says. “It’s the willingness to do everything around football and deliver consistently that is really critical, and impressive.
“Even with a significant injury history, if a player has the mindset that they’re going to do more than just extend their career, you could have someone who’s going to keep getting better physically, has a ton of experience and knows how to play the game. That’s a very dangerous player — and that’s what you’re seeing with Salah.”
Additional reporting: Conor O’Neill
(Top photo: Michael Steele/Getty Images; Eamonn Dalton)
