Our friend from the US Navy makes the best case. If your life depended on it, and you were prevented from treading water, you would float (unless you had a panic attack and drowned yourself).
For those of you who insist that you cannot float, I have to think that it is, as mmmiiikkkeee pointed out, a case of you thinking/wishing you were special/cool. Or, more likely, that you wish to call attention to your low body fat %.
Now, if someone (preferably with an advanced degree, not some shmoe with a copy of Physics for Dummies) would talk to me about the physics, I would much appreciate it.
I am not a great athlete, but I do consider myself a fairly good swimmer. When I met my husband he claimed to be a “sinker”. He said that since he never learned to tread water if he stopped swimming he would sink. I thought he was nuts. So, I took him swimming. Sure enough, he sank! So I tried to teach him to tread. Well, it’s been 13 yrs., and he still can’t tread water. He also has a bit more body fat than most of us would like and you would he’d float. So , yes, I do believe some people do sink, and I don’t think that body fat has all that much to do with it.
Chronos, you’re right that body position doesn’t really matter. It’s not that I can’t float on my back, I just can’t do it in a way that keeps my mouth/nose free of water so I can breath while doing so.
But I do contend I couldn’t float when I was younger - I’d fill my lungs full of air, go completely limp, and slowly drift to the bottom of the pool. Now I do the same thing and I float.
I don’t float either. I haven’t been in a pool in a long time but I’ve tried to float in various positions with lungs fully inflated and I sink, slowly but surely. I’ve never heard that anyone could float though so I didn’t think I was abnormal in that way. I don’t believe everyone can float and I don’t see why some of you folks insist that it must be so.
It might be uncommon but it certainly isn’t impossible that some of us won’t float.
Ooh, look at me as I stupidly sink to the bottom, don’t you wish you could sink? nope, don’t think so
**
slightly more likely, but not true in my case, I’m not a skin and bones type, but I sink (wow, it’s so cool)
If an object displaces more than it’s own weight of fluid, it floats, otherwise not, that’s prettymuch it, unless you’re small enough for things like surface tension to make a difference.
I’m not kidding, I really can’t float, it’s not the sort of thing that one can easily be mistaken about…
I swim a lot, open water swimming as well as pool workouts. I feel I’m reasonably comfortable in the water, in fact, water relaxes me. As long as I’m sculling or treading or swimming, I stay up.
When I stop, I go straight to the bottom. (And no, my overall body fat percentage is not all that low - but I do have a theory based on where I tend to carry fat)