Um, cite?
Marginally. I’m a really good swimmer, but I can’t float without kicking a bit. My legs go down and drag the rest of me with them. I’d never be able to stop moving, but floating on my back does use less energy than treading water.
As far as the “fat floats” thing, it has to do with overall body density and center of mass. One of my aunts is as round as an apple, but she’s muscular and thick-boned under the fat so she goes right down if she stops moving. Women generally have less muscle mass, thinner and slightly less dense bones than men, higher body fat, and a center of mass that’s closer to their hips, so they usually float better than men do. That’s obviously not true in all cases, but it helps.
Thin people can have more visceral fat than is apparent and so float better than an obviously fat person who has more external and less internal fat. Besides, people who are really overweight actually have to have more muscle than you’d think to carry the extra poundage around, so their overall density is sometimes higher than you’d guess just by looking at them.
Hey, a fellow Sammamishian, Sammamite, or whatever we’re called. I’m about 12% bodyfat and heat kills me. I sweat when it’s 70 degrees, so I don’t think bodyfat is a huge factor in heat tolerance. As for floating, I sink like a stone. On my back, I can keep my upper body afloat if my arms are spread out, but my legs will sink. I never did learn how to swim.
Bob Grey? Is that you?
As for me, I have plenty of floaters in my eyes.
I can float on my back, but I have to keep moving my arms or else I’ll start to sink. If my lungs are full I’ll stay at the surface, but once I exhale I start drifting down.
Float.
I’ve told this story before. When I was 9, I fell into the deepest point of a large pool. At the time I couldn’t swim. There was nobody else in the pool. So, quite logically actually, I panicked. Only this little voice in the back of my head said “damnit lass if you’re going to drown yourself to death at least do it with dignity!” and then I said “ok, that makes sense” and stopped floundering. And lo and behold, I noticed that I was moving (with reference to my surroundings) in spite of being still, and then my back broke the surface. I popped my head out, drew air, paddled out and never said a word to my parents because I was more afraid of their reaction that I’d been of drowning, really. After all, if you drown it’s over, whereas parental yelling gets repeated ad infinitum (my mother has been known to stay mad at me about an incident for 12 years, between ages 5 and 17 specifically).
I float better now, since I have more fat (i.e., lower density) than when I was a 9yo stick-girl.
I’m fat. I float.
My mate is thin. He sinks.
i floated once. it was wonderful, i was sitting in the water like i was sitting on a lounge chair. i looked over at my mum and said “you do this all the time?! this is really cool!”.
we were in the dead sea. the only place i can float (haven’t tried the great salt lake yet).
as with acid lamp, i don’t have to wear weights when i dive. getting back to the surface? that is the tricky bit.
I backed my car into a cop car the other day, he just drove off, sometimes life’s okay.
But still, I don’t float in fresh water. Probably my low fat %.
Folks, floating is different than buoyancy. Floating is a skill – that’s why we teach it to little kids in swim lessons. Body position, the amount of air in your lungs, etc. all contribute to whether you will float, or whether you will glubglubglub.
Buoyancy is affected by your body characteristics. In general, women and fat men are neutrally buoyant; skinny men, muscular men and women, and children are generally negatively buoyant.
It is easier to float if you are more buoyant, but it is not a given. It is certainly possible to float if you are negatively buoyant – just about every competitive swimmer, ever, is negatively buoyant. They can float just fine.
That’s just not physically possible. If you are negatively buoyant, you are going to sink. I mean, that’s the definition of negatively buoyant. If you are denser than water you are going to sink no matter what position you contort yourself into.
Fortunately, humans have lungs that can change their buoyancy, and body position can distribute weight to change buoyancy as well. Thus the ability to learn to float.
Anyone who has taught swimming lessons has seen this. Kids have difficulty floating on their back because of the tendency to “sit down” in the water – their weight isn’t as well distributed, and so they sink. Once they actually lie flat on the water, they float.
My torso floats, but my legs sink if I don’t move them. I’ve got chicken legs, and a little extra around the middle.
People use “float” as a euphamism for “not sinking”. Because it’s easier to tell children in swimming lessons you’re teaching them to float than to explain you’re going to show them how to not sink.* Even people with negative buoyancy can keep themselves from sinking - and it’s a lot easier to do so if you mind your positioning and technique.
To answer the OP, as I mentioned in the other thread, I do not float. Even in salt water, I head downwards if I don’t actively try to keep myself up. Low center of gravity, dense bones, and a whole lot of muscle mass even though I’m somewhat overweight. Although, annoyingly, my breasts float quite nicely - not enough to keep me afloat, but they’re noticeably more buoyant than the rest of me.
*When you have a class filled with four to six year olds who you are responsible for teaching how not to drown, and you attempt to explain “not-sinking”, if you don’t call it floating, you will get some weisenheimer who wants to argue six-year-old semantics with you. This is a pain in the ass. To avoid this pain in the ass, the folks who standardize swimming lessons (bet you didn’t know they were standardized!) made “floating” a defined term of art. “Floating” is a swimming stroke - like breast stroke, side stroke or the crawl. Forget attempting to explain the concept of “negative buoyancy” to a four-year-old. It’s just a little unfortunate that floating is also a technical term for “positive buoyancy”. Additionally, you want to avoid mentioning “sinking” to small children taking their first swimming lessons at all. A fair number of them are leery of going underwater and some of them are completely spazzed out by the thought of their heads going under. It can be a struggle to get them over the hump of putting their heads all the way under, and it’s vastly, vastly easier to do once they’ve internalized that it’s always going to be possible for them to get their head back out of the water (which is a primary reason for teaching them to float first - and calling it floating).
Although I am fat, floating is not easy for me because my feet sink. If I want to float without any aids, I have to bend my knees to keep my feet up or else I end up vertical.
heh. Aangelica captures teaching floating, perfectly. Pretty much the same applies to teaching adult nonswimmers to float, by the way.
There is the occasionaly odd egg – like my six year old weisenheimer nephew – that had to have all the background information on buoyancy, density, etc. explained before he could figure out how to stop sinking.
Patient: Why do you call it a “teaching hospital”?
Doctor: Because calling it a “learning hospital” was scaring people!
Thank you! I can’t believe, on these boards, it took 11 posts for someone to say that!
As for a cite, take a look at the Baywatch babes. You think they had those figures purely for aesthetic purposes? Them’s *lifesaving boobs! *
Aren’t all human beings denser than water? I don’t mean just those who have fewer brain cells than a bottle of Perrier.
If i remain completely calm, and maximise the air in my lungs, i can keep my face(and nothing else) above water.