squats

[ozonejunkie]

I've been doing alot of squats for the past year or so. Thorwing 10 lbs. or so on every 1-2 weeks. I like to do them with very strict form and go past parallel, almost as far down as I can go. My question is, is there a weight that when I reach I should consider not going down that far. I'm just worried about having a knee blow out with a whole lot of weight on my back.

 

[Karky]

You're knee wont blow out from doing heavy squats past parallell.
The whole "dont squat below parallell" is a bunch of BS if you ask me, unless you got an injury of some sort.

 

[dswithers]

I agree with Karky. The only way to "injure" your knee is if you are using a weight that is more than you can handle properly and bounce at the bottom, that is you allow yourself to go all the way to the point that your connective tissue is stretch to the max and then use the bubber band effect of the connective tissue to begin your rise. To prevent that you can either pause briefly at the bottom or just stop using muscle force just short of stretching your connective tissue. Look at some of the videos on itube of olympic lifters going all the way to the bottom with 600+ pounds and they do not damage their knees. And they do some variation of squats or cleans almost every day of the week.