It's just a technique; anybody can learn it eventually. Like my uncle relayed what a ski instructor said to him about skiing moguls, "It's just another technique you'd learn, it's not some inherent skill that some people have and some people don't."

Like knobster said (and I kinda missed it until Laurel Lane quoted him), it can be as easy as just standing up and using your body weight for the downstroke.

This is what I was alluding to when I mentioned using a gear tall enough that it feels like climbing stairs (but not so tall that it feels like the stairs are three feet high ). That's something that everybody does every day, unless they live in a ranch-style home and use escalators and elevators everywhere else.