Little background: I’m 31yo and I’ve been lifting weights for 10+ years, and I’ve unfortunately recently developed knee pain, which is felt mostly during squats. During those years, I never wore knee sleeves as I didn’t know what they were, and now I wish I knew about them, they might have helped (or not, depending on what’s my issue).

I thought about 2 hypotheses:

• Maybe I have bad form, which eventually made my knees over-used
• I’ve been lazy this past year and slacked off the gym. I’ve lost a lot of strength during that time, and I recently started taking it more seriously, and I might have gone at it too heavy or too much too soon, and that resulted in injury

Machine assisted hack squats give me the same pain, inclined leg press give me a little bit less pain, and machine leg extensions don’t really give me that much pain, so I wonder what’s going on there. Straight-legged deadlifts are mostly fine, but there’s some pain on the initial motion lifting off the ground.

Nevertheless, this has spread out into my daily life, my knees have a slight pain while walking up the stairs, and also while I get up from a chair.

Here’s a video of me squatting from different angles, perhaps this might help diagnose if I have a problem with my form:

Not sure what to do about this situation. I’m a perpetual traveller which means I’m always moving around, so seeing a doctor for rehabilitation is not really an option. Should I just rest my legs for some weeks/months? Or exercises I can do?