Force Absorption

I’ve read training manuals say you should try to fight the knee bending when landing, and I’ve read training manuals say that you should land as softly as possible which would mean more knee bend. What are your takes on this?

I go back and forth on the subject because landing with minimal knee bend makes sense during sports because the less you have to bend your knee to jump, the faster you get up, but I know that has more to do with your muscle type. However, lets say on a rebound you jump up, and the ball takes a funny bounce and you have to land and jump back up again, the less you bend your knees, the faster you get up to go get the ball. I want to become a strength coach (pursuing my exercise science degree), and I don’t want to teach athletes something that could hurt them.

I’m thinking landing with minimal knee bend is more useful in sports, but would hurt the joints more. So I’m thinking that when training, you should try to land as soft as possible, but when playing, you play your sports, landing with minimal knee bend would be more efficient.

What are the different effects between landing with minimal knee bend and absorbing the force? Another thing I was thinking, which may be obvious to a lot of you, but just made sense to me when I started to think about it, is that the more strength your legs have, the less your legs will have to bend when landing.

Minimal knee bend has more chance of damaging knee tendons, but you can use soft landing as a technique to resist injury for later incidents, where minimal knee bend is needed. Just like a stepping stone, soft landing is a lead up to landing and then instantly moving. You could get your students to train using soft landing from a hight, and then after a few weeks, soft landing into a run, then they will eventually start using the techniques in their ball games on their own.
I only suggest you build up to it because I have torn my knee tendon playing soccer by sprinting one direction and then instantly stopping and sprinting the opposite direction (no pause). I had done no shock absorption training, but if you get your students to train using minimal knee bend straight away, you are effectively doing what I did to injure myself.