why is it harder to skip a stair step going down than it is going up?
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You accelerate going down. When your foot reaches the step, you’re at the fastest speed. Going up, not only are you generally slowing on accent, but your foot isn’t impacting to act against your body’s speed*mass.
The muscle groups used when going up are bigger and stronger. The muscle groups used when going down are activated less and let the body fall on to the rubber band like connective tissues. Going down is akin to controlled falling and this causes the tendons (connective tissue between muscles and bone) and ligaments (connective tissue between bone) to work harder.
I think it’s mainly down to center of balance and how your body falls into place.
When you bend your leg and move to place it two stairs up, your center of mass moves forward and you start to fall forward, but your foot lands on the stairs almost instantly, restoring your balance and halting your fall. If you have sufficiently large legs you might not even have a moment of falling.
But when going down, as soon as you start moving your front leg forward you have a long way to fall before your foot hits the stair, unless you start by bending your *back* leg down first, which is a difficult move. You’ll have a lot more momentum to deal with and if you can’t stop in time you’ll over-rotate and fall all the way down the stairs.
you are accelerating when going down(that’s just how gravity works) and the general sense your body has to try to keep balance.
you are falling off if you mess up skipping a step down or at the least you are putting a lot of pressure in one leg and instinctively you know this so there is more resistance to doing this action.
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