• Try walking down a set of stairs (preferably one with a handrail). Do you drop the last few inches onto your lead foot? Yeah, everyone does. Try not to do this while descending! Practice going down stairs and halting your lead foot a 1/4" before it contacts the step. This moves the stress to your flexed rear leg musculature, and reduces impact. Consider incorporating some of this resistance to your descending stride.
  
• Do you extend your lead leg fully? Are you fairly close to fully extended on any part of your stride descending? Try not to do this either! Your stride should be short; well inside full extension, slightly sunken down, to lower your centre of gravity, and to keep the majority of your weight inside your stride, never overtop your lead leg.
  
• Are your foot placements linear (like, in a row?) Also do not do this. You should have a wider than normal stance, with some amount of side to side motion, allowing your hips to move with and help absorb the impact of descending, and to let the sides of your feet to take a bit more load and help with stability.
  
• You can also change up your descending line, adding mini-switchbacking when the direct descending becomes too steep for littler fast steps, or whatever.
  

Blitter fucked around with this message at 05:47 on Jul 15, 2016