One of the biggest things that really helps when squatting and pulling wide is to actively spread the floor more, and jam your knees in an imaginary path that leads kinda of diagonally back and out. Doing this makes your glutes feel like they are torqueing more fully and more laterally towards the glute ham tie in.
It seems to take a while to get used to the motion and strong enough in it that your groin muscles are protected. Without this outward spreading motion, the upper adductors and pectineus can easily get jacked up and you lose a lot of force. It takes a while to not only automatically do the motion, but to get strong in it as well.
Switching straight to sumo for me was a bitch, I was a little stronger, but it hurt like hell. What I did was spent a few extra workout doing really light high rep sets of the following:
cossak squats
deficit pulls
wide stance pullthroughs
ab/adductors
No matter how strong you think your hips are, they need to be stronger. You need to integrate the ab/adductors into the hip extension in a functional fashion or else what I think happens is that the adductor magnus fucks up the tracking of your hip joints.
One of the worst mistakes I made was stretching. It sounds weird but I was doing the typical sitting front splits stretch where you lean forward and stretch the groin and hamstrings. This just fucked my up worse. I was constantly opening up new range of motion that I didn’t need, and that my muscles didn’t know how to use under a maximal effort. If you lack the flexibility to keep your knees out, back arched, chest up etc, Work on building it up under some kind of minimal load where the muscles have to be active. Box squats, pullthroughs, etc. It seems for powerlifting anyways, that for me, I work better by not statically stretching if I can help it. Ie; if my low back is pumped and tight after back raises, ill do a few sets of dead bugs or reverse crunches. If my hip flexors are tight, some lunges or pullthroughs seem to do the trick to get my hips out of tilt. It also seems that any ROM gained by static stretching is fleeting and lost after a few hours or a day or two. Foam rolling and work with a baseball etc works wonders though.
Basically to sum it up, Wide stance is much more different that it looks for squat and deadlift. In narrow stance you basically just shove your hips back and then shove them forwards, maybe push your knees out a bit. Wide stance is a more complicated mind-muscle connection and requires a difference groove to maximize drive and prevent injury. You built up your oly stance and conventional deads by starting light and learning the groove, you have to do this all over again at least for 2-3 weeks with wide stance. or you can just slap on some briefs or a suit and just grip and rip, but it catches up to you.
Of course I am only barely an intermediate with my squat/dead in the 500-600 range single ply, but this is what I have come to realize for myself.
