> I hate hearing friends tell me that they don't squat because their knees hurt. Dude, your knees hurt because you don't squat! This is not strictly true. What

> I hate hearing friends tell me that they don't squat because their knees hurt. Dude, your knees hurt because you don't squat! This is not strictly true. What works for you does not necessarily work for others, and hassling them for not doing something that hurts them isn't going to help. I've been lifting for almost three years (started Dec 2010). I have very good form which I learned from a friend who was very experienced in lifting (and corroborated by several trainers and random dudes at the gym saying "wow, nice form!"). Before I started lifting I had been running for about 10 years (started running in middle school, didn't start lifting until after college). Everything was going great. Lifting three days a week, running another three days a week, and resting completely one day. Then one day I took a weird step while running and my right knee started hurting. It's never stopped hurting. Two X-Rays, an MRI, two physical therapists later and they don't have any idea why I'm in constant pain (literally constant pain, I'm constantly aware of my knee hurting). I still lift, still with good form, still moving lots of weight around, but my knee still hurts. I can't run anymore, though, as that aggravates the injury. And before you say it, I hurt my knee after I had been running in vibrams for three years. I was running 6-7 miles 3x a week in vibrams and all it took was one weird step to totally ruin that. After the injury, on a PT's advice, I tried switching back to "normal" running shoes. They didn't help at all. I played around with my gait, trying to run with a wider stance since they were guessing my narrow gait was putting stress on the bad point in my knee; that didn't help. Stretching doesn't help, drugs don't really help (the most effective drug so far is Aleve). Lifting seems to have no effect on my knee. I tried not lifting or running for three months and my knee still hurt. I picked lifting back up and it made no difference to my pain levels. Anyway, I'm just trying to say that we all have different physical ailments that cannot necessarily be solved by general advice. Maybe your friends' knees hurt because there's something wrong with them and lifting will make it worse.