. It doesn''t seem that way. If you fall, you fall forwards, but not very far.
If you're going down stairs forwards and fall, you topple forwards and take a tumble. The results are painful. But also, stiff joints inhibit your ability to flex the hips, so your torso tends to lean forward and overbalance you.
When you get to my age you'll understand. <smiley>
Yeah, I know. You had to walk five miles to school and it was uphill both ways.
FDR was president when I was born...how about you :-)
Had dirt been invented by then, or did that come later?
I was thinking the same thing, but I just saw his explanation for doing it that way. I'm not old enough to argue.
In my case, we sold the house with stairs and bought a single story to replace it. Besides no stairs to deal with, it's much more comfortable, temperature wise. I always found it very difficult to maintain an even temperature between the various floors.
The worst was the house in Kansas, with it's beautiful wide open staircases. In the winter, with all furnace vents closed except in the basement, it would be 50-55 in the basement, 70 on the main floor, and 85 upstairs in the bedrooms, not to mention the fact that we were stressing the heck out of the furnace by having most of the vents closed.
Really, you should try it both ways. I do it that way in the morning, not so much to avoid falling, but because until the joints loosen a bit it's much easier to go down backwards. There are more joints that need good range of motion forward. I have arthritis developing from old injuries and they're stiff in the morning. I spend the first half hour stretching while I drink my morning coffee.
I will grant that backwards can be dangerous if someone has left clutter on the stairs that you didn't notice. Especially roller skates, hate that.
When the children were toddlers I made them do "tummy in" on steep stairs. It was clearly safer. Similarly coming down a ladder frontwards is a mistake most people only make a few times, although I've run into some stubborn knuckleheads who got hurt more than they needed.
Do this simple experiment. I think you will find backwards feels safer.
Stand on a flat floor. Balance on one foot. Reach forward with the other. Notice it can't touch the ground? It will hover maybe 4 inches above the floor. When we walk or run, we do it by falling forward. Our center of gravity moves forward. On a stair, that 4 inches gets added to the 7 inches of the tread, so the fall is larger. Try it on a stair paying attention, and probably want to hold the rail.
Now repeat on a flat floor, but reach backward. To put that foot on the ground, the natural instinct is just bend the supporting knee, with the center of gravity stable. Yes, you can theoretically do that forwards as well but that's not the way we learned to walk so most of us don't or can't.
Looking for some thing on the left side for stability.
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