Keeping your head out of the water is your other main mistake. It’s a common one, and shows that good swimming technique sure isn’t instinctive. Seems to me we’re pretty much hardwired to keep our heads out of the soup, and have to learn to overcome that to swim half decently.
I had the same problem, I body surfed in the ocean every summer day for many years, my swimming muscles were very developed I just never became an efficient swimmer or had the ability to trad water very long. Now That I am older I can float in the ocean. I could swim fairly fast bot only for short distance, a 100yard save myself swim would have been scary and challenging.
People from the slums of 1700’s British cities probably did not get a lot of practice swimming. Even the rural inhabitants probably didn’t do a lto of swimming in a land where things were pretty cold a lot of the year.
I’d be surprised a lot of coastal inhabitants near warmer water, in warmer climates, did not swim - but again, why bother? Most sandy beaches don’t hav a lot of useful reasons for swimming - if the sand goes out hundreds of feet, it’s not like there’s ineresting items to dive for. Recreation was pretty low on people’s list when the main impetus was to find food.
Another point to consider - saw an article on “why are there not very many black swim champions when they dominate every other sport?” - of course, the economic class that has regular access to swimming pools is a factor, but also African races living in the tropics tend to have much lower subcutaneous fat levels - meaning less buoyancy. As a result, they spend more energy trying to stay afloat rather than going forward.
(I have the opposite problem - from experience, I need a substantial weight belt just to achieve neutral buoyancy for scuba diving in salt water.)
The feeling in some place like the dead sea is very bizarre if you are used to water. Well before you expect it, you suddenly find your feet flopping out from under you and you float horizontal- too buoyant to stay vertical.
That’s a good example indeed of what you’re going to do “instinctively” if you don’t know how to swim and that is entirely counter-productive. It takes a good amount of training to do otherwise, and there’s nothing natural about keeping your head underwater and breathing only exactly at the right moment in coordination with your limbs’ movements.
True, but I do know people whose feet float, all by themselves. Must be nice!
For survival purposes, the best way to float isn’t on your back, anyway. For long-term floatation, the best is not very instinctive: the jellyfish float. Face down, let your head, arms, and legs hang, with your back up and parallel to the surface. Rock back to raise your head periodically to breathe. IIRC, this is the float with the lowest energy requirement. The main disadvantage is you can’t see rescue approaching, so you’d want to combine that periodically treading, heads-up and scanning.
The international distress symbol is to raise your arm or arms (if you can) and wave. Try doing that if you can’t swim! The symbol for “I’m OK” is to make a circle over your head with your arms. If you have only one hand available, put your hand on your head, making a circle with your arm. However, everyone tends to ignore this, even the Coast Guard. But it can be useful among people who know each other well enough, like diver buddies. If you can’t swim, you don’t need to know this. 
My mother, who grew up on a midwestern farm, was a poor swimmer and, afraid her children would drown without her being able to save them, she enforced summer swimming lessons just as soon as we were eligible for them (I vaguely remember it was 2nd grade). In the 1960’s, California put money into the public school systems, and there were free children’s swimming lessons all summer long in the high school pools. All of us had to take lessons until we passed Advanced, which involved diving off the low board, picking something up off the bottom of the 10 foot diving pool, treading water for 10 minutes, and swimming two lengths of the lap pool in every stroke: breaststroke, elementary and racing backstroke, crawl, sidestroke. The butterfly was an exotic stroke then, which I never really learned.
I also remember that the very first lessons were about how to safely get into the pool, and then how to put your face in the water, exhale, and turn your head to the side and inhale. Then we walked in the shallow end doing that, learning how to add the rhythm of the crawl arm motions to it. We learned the crawl first. 30 minutes a day, five days a week, two months a year, for about five years. We all learned to swim well. I don’t remember anyone imagining we could learn all this on our own.
I think all my mother’s children adhered to the exact same policy with their own children, except that by then California had gutted its educational system and we had to pay for it.
I can swim, I swam a lot as a kid and teenager, but I can’t stay afloat for shit. I’m an absolutely amazing underwater swimmer, and I can even breathe doing an austrian crawl (e.g. while moving). But if I was stranded in the ocean and had to stay afloat for hours I’d be screwed.
I learned how to swim when I was twenty. Nothing about swimming was instinctual. It took an instructor and a friend with limitless patience over about twenty hour long sessions for me to be comfortable enough to handle myself and not drown without any floatation aids.
We slowly built up through staying underwater, managing breathing, floating on my front, back, pushing off pool walls, kicking, strokes, and so forth. It’s 1% seeing/hearing what to do and 99% practice.
Can zombies swim?
The wife can’t swim. She never learned as a child because her mother was deathly afraid of water. She’ll mention a desire to learn from time to time, but she seems content just splashing around close to shore.
We call it the Dead Man’s Float.
For survival purposes, the most important stroke to learn has to be sidestroke, which is the best way to cover the greatest distance with the least energy.
Of course, if you have to get to something fast, the crawl is the ticket. As a windsurfer, I’ve occasionally had to bust a gut to get back to my board, which was zooming away from me in wind and waves. No doubt it would eventually slow down thanks to the sail dropping in the water and acting like a sea anchor, but when the water’s cold, very little conscious thought goes into getting back on the damn board ASAP!
Is negative buoyancy really a thing? I could see having zero buoyancy (aka Neutral buoyancy), where you don’t float; but negative buoyancy? To me, that means when you’re in water you’re sucked to the bottom!
Regardless, I know several adults who don’t know how to swim; including my father in law; who was in the US Navy! A lot of people can’t swim because because of a cultural thing ‘back in the day.’ Polio is one of the main reasons children from the 50s can’t swim. Simply put; public swimming pools were closed when children of the 50s would be learning to swim. In the 1950s, polio had become one of the most serious communicable diseases among children in the United States.
In 1952 alone, nearly 60,000 children were infected with the virus; thousands were paralyzed, and more than 3,000 died. To slow down the disease public swimming pools were shut down.
An object with lower density than water has positive buoyancy if fully submerged. The force of the water is larger than the force of gravity and the object will accelerate upwards.
An object with the same density as water fully submerged, or one of the previously mentioned objects floating on the surface, has zero buoyancy. The force of the water perfectly balances the force of gravity.
An object with greater density than water will accelerate downwards since the force of gravity is larger than the force from the water. How would you describe the buoyancy of such an object? And how does its movement differ from being sucked to the bottom?
I started taking swimming lessons when I was five, so the idea of not being able to swim is just absolutely alien to me. I’m not a particularly good swimmer, mind you, in that my technique is absolutely atrocious and I’m not very fast, but I can stay afloat. I even learned to do the lifeguard kick, so I can keep myself up with just my legs.
That being said, my best friend spent a good chunk of his childhood in rural Alaska, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know how to swim. I mean, honestly, where would he have learned? My ex-spouse also wasn’t comfortable in water over his head, and would cling to the side; I suspect he never had lessons. So much of it has to boil down to what you acclimated to as a child. The water is natural for me 'cause I grew up with it.
I was really put off by the breast stroke - always found it really energy sapping and the constant bobbing really annoying, one I was taught the front and back strokes though swimming became a lot more fluid and easier and probs overall more enjoyable
I can attest that there are adults that can’t swim. A buddy of mine had said a few times that he couldn’t swim, but I didn’t think he was absolutely dead serious. So a few of us were at the lake and I coaxed him in to just floating, and he floated a bit. Then he tried to stand up and found out he was over his head and he freaked out. I thought he was going to drown, so I tried to drag him in, and he damn near drowned me.
Right – I don’t think it’s possible to have negative boyancy such that you can sink just a foot or two and then be neutral at that depth. If you have negative boyancy at the top, you’ll sink straight to the bottom if you don’t take action to avoid it. This is one reason why I’m suspicious of some claims above.
Well, it’s possible for any object that is less compressible than water. Since we’re mostly water but part air (e.g., in our lungs), we’re a lot more compressible than water.
As any SCUBA diver knows, as you descend, the pressure mounts (due to the weight of the column of water plus the column of air on top of you). As the pressure mounts, the air in your lungs compresses and gets more dense. So, your boyancy goes down as you descend.
Divers use boyancy compensation devices (BCDs) to deal with this. It’s basically an air bladder, usually fitting like a vest, that you can blow up by your mouth and/or the air tank. Near the top, you not only have it empty, you generally have to have a belt with lead weights on it, to have neutral boyancy. At less than 10 foot depth, you feel your boyancy go way up as you breathe in and down as you breathe out. As you descend, you need to put more and more air in the BDC to keep neutral boyancy.
At the end of a deep dive, you have to take care to bleed air out of the BCD as you rise, to avoid becoming a balloon and shooting to the surface (which is a bad thing, likely to cause the bends.)
And I don’t get it when someone says they can
I couldn’t save myself in an emergency, I know that because I had to be fished out of the pit of a pool they taught us in at school :rolleyes:
I can’t play football, rugby, snooker, golf or any other physical activities that require a modicum of dexterity to any degree beyond complete novice. For whatever reason I can’t (probably lack of interest, leading to lack of practise) I also can’t swim.
My friend went swimming in the Dead Sea and enjoyed it until he opened his eyes underwater. 33% salinity didn’t feel too good on his eyeballs.
Is it true you couldn’t drown in the Dead Sea even if you tried? (Perhaps a bit of an exaggeration.) Due to the buoyant properties of the salinity.