Squat Health Standards (Minimal Strength Necessary)

The squat is an obvious choice for total lower body strength. An excellent activity for building strength, power, capacity in the quads and glutes among other musculature. 

However, this begs the question how strong is strong enough?

It's very easy to say "You need to just get stronger."

But that wouldn't do the human body justice as many different qualities impact overall health and wellness. Qualities such as movement coordination, dynamic control, positional integrity, respiratory efficiency, etc.

Strength, hypertrophy and power is the low hanging fruit and very easy to address through proper programming. So hence the question, how long should I be emphasizing this low hanging fruit or is my time better spent elsewhere?

For sports performance it may be beneficial to push beyond this and continue to build strength, power, or capacity depending on the needs of the sport. But if we are looking at this question from purely a health and wellness perspective, in my opinion performing a box squat with your body weight on the barbell for 3 x 10 reps is more than sufficient. 

There will always be a point of diminishing returns, and that is what we are trying to answer with this question. Now for certain age ranges this number may be unrealistic. However, for the majority of people this should be a very obtainable goal. 

Full Disclosure - a good coach/clinician will know how to train multiple qualities for you in a single program. But that's beyond the scope of this article. The purpose of this article is to say that if you have not met this strength standard, building more strength will most likely do you some good!

I fully realize their are different forms of squats that you could do. For the purpose of this article, my intent was to select the simplest version that requires the least amount of technical coaching to train at this particular load.