Try stretching your legs before n after exercising, before exercise- dynamic stretching, after exercise- static stretching. it’ll improve ur flexibility and help stay away 4m injuries.

While this might be true in the sense that you should never use a ROM that is clearly painful and/or takes you into extremes such as making a muscle enter passive insufficiency (e.g. – bringing the bar all the way down to the chest on CGBP is commonly a shoulder overkill for long-limbed trainees, especially if their upper torso (chest) girth is small as well).

On the other hand, restricted ROM is most often, especially in beginning trainees, result of poor motor patterns and flexibility. Only when these barriers have been removed, through proper teaching and practice, discuss what exactly is natural ROM and what really feels comfortable.

Restricting ROM before having considerable amount of practical experience with the particular exercise is what usually proves disastrous for joints and overall muscle balance in the long run.

Hm, “natural” can be a lot of things. I’d say keep an eye on how your body reacts to the different ROMs and choose the one you are most comfortable with.

Heah Malakias, thanks for sharing this! Hope everything is ok with you now!

If somebody would have taught me this 25 years ago, I would have been saved for numerous breaks of exercising for months because of knee pain and even muscle sprains above knee.
It is really a shame that the importance of wide stance is not taken seriously in mainstream weight training. It is just thought as a peculiarity of power lifters.

However, I haven’t had any knee pain for many years, because I finally realized how to squat: Deep squat with wide stance, and concentrating on keeping knees as straight above the ankles as possible.
The key is really to not let knees go forward from the center of gravity when going down; it is not just the angle of knee that matters.
In fact, doing deep squats causes less knee pain which is especially noticeable when doing variations of one-leg squats because in practise one-leg squats easily (I mean like unintentionally) concentrate more on quads eventhough you would concentrate on glutes and hams. This is probably because one-leg exercise requires more muscles to keep the balance. In fact, I am doing one-leg exercises so that I don’t straighten the leg, I mean not even close. The worst thing I could do for my knees is to do squats (or actually any kind of leg exercise, this applies even leg extension machine) with only a small angle. This causes the highest stress on tendions from quads to knees which soon causes knee pain. This is not even related to the amount of weights: with the same weights doing partial squat between 100 – 50 degrees does not cause any pain, but doing squat between 60 – 10 degrees starts hurting knees.

Those studies where deep squat has shown to be harmful for knees are based on squatting with narrow stance, which is the common way of squatting unless you are not a power lifter.
With narrow stance knees are forced to go forward from the center of gravity when going down. This is the reason of knee pain, not the knee angle.

Ahn-nyung KHJ, thank you for adding your experience. It may give some people food for thought about how important it is to have a qualified instructor with you when attempting to do squats.

I hope you will fully heal and be able to further enjoy working out!

I absolutely agree with you.
It’s not about the correct form, but about the hamstring flexibility.

My knees injured (the quadriceps tendon) doing the full squat.
It’s so hurt that I cannot ride a bicycle and run.

Before I start weight training, a weight trainer gave me advice to do the full squat on internet.
He said “The parallel squat is the false squat, so you must do the full squat, not the parallel squat. Just ignore them who say about the risk of a knee injury. It’s good for your hip joint and knees”
I trusted him and practice it for 1 month,
but my knees injured.

I think the reason I injured is that my hamstring is inflexible.
If someone who lacks hamstring flexibility do full squat, he must get injury.
I’d like to tell the full squat lovers.
Please do not suggest full squat without warning of the risk of a knee injury.
Remember that your thoughtless suggest may spoil someone’s life.

Also my prolotherapist told me that there are a risk of injury ligaments of hip joint.
So Even if you do full squat correctly, don’t overtrain it.

Now I cannot do any exercise forever because of full squat.
I feel miserable 🙁