I can't not squat deep without hurting knees (hamstrings over flexible?)

[asstochina]

I just got into taking weight lifting seriously and thought I'd learn one of the most fundamental exercises ever, the squat, however when I get into the hole I've got no idea how far I'm meant to go.

I've done a lot of reading and from what I can tell, parallel is bad on the knees and I should be "bouncing" at the point where my hamstrings run out of stretch. The problem is that I have extremely flexible hamstrings and legs for that matter because I literally squatted my whole childhood when I was using the computer, watching tv or pretty much whenever I sat down. So when I sit back I can get my ass all the way to the ground and then if I wanted to my knees could slip past that and relax on either side of my shoulder.

I can maintain a pretty much perfectly arched back and whatnot but when it comes to the end of the exercise I pretty much have no choice other than to just *stop* and put the weight onto my knees as I reverse and bring my butt up.

Now, I haven't added any substantial amount of weight onto it yet and I can imagine when I do my back may round or whatever but I don't see how adding more weight is going to make my hamstring any less relaxed and give me any more of a bounce, so, please help so I can not **** my knees up.

p.s when the title says "without hurting knees" my knees don't actually hurt, I'm just afraid of getting a bad form and I'd like to correct it as I'm learning how to do the exercise rather than having to change it later on when it hurts me. I do feel the weight shift onto my knees though when I'm about to come up.

[zezi25]

Vid yourself and post it here so we can see of there is something wrong.

[Jasonk282]

post a vid so we can see what's exactly happening.

[GuinnessPower]

This video helped me when I first started off.

[BenBlue]

double negative

[PaulRivers]

I've done a lot of reading and from what I can tell, parallel is bad on the knees and I should be "bouncing" at the point where my hamstrings run out of stretch.

If you're reading anything that claims that going to or below parallel is bad for your knees, then what you're reading is idiotic.

It's bad for the knees to not go below parallel. How far below that you go down is a matter of preference.

You should be going down at least this far for a squat:


If you go down all the way, it's called an "ass to grass" (or atg) squat, and that's fine to. Mostly the difference is that if you're competing, you can squat the maximum amount of weight by just going to "just below parallel" like in the pic above. But a lot of people do ass-to-grass just because. :-)