Technique my man, technique. It's all in the wrist.I fixed many a loose stair-tooled step through the years. Kicked-on was much tighter.
Top down of done wright is a shoulders, chest, hand and wrist workout.
I've never used a kicker. When going top down, I start center out to the left, then center to the right and with 80% of my body weight bearing down on the carpet tool, I was only hooking about 3 or 4 pins per each downward motion. Tight doesn't begin to describe it. When walking down a set of stairs your foot applies downward force, so that's the rational I had in my head, continuing the method o was taught. It's crappy technique that causes restretches on stairs.
.....and boy have we all seen a lot of that over the years....or decades.
In Daris's case, centuries.