If you were to fully exhale in that position you would sink. Someone with no swimmimg experience having to hold their breath under water, occasionally raising their head to breathe, is likely to do the real dead man’s float before long.
Swimming, or just staying afloat, isn’t that difficult a skill to learn. I think there are a lot of people who develop a fear of water at an early age and carry that into adulthood. An adult should be able to learn to swim readily, and even with no experience use the knowledge of how to swim or stay afloat if they have to. But if they have a general fear of the situation they’ll be at a disadvantage in an emergency. And I’d say some fear of water is beneficial if you don’t know how to swim. Learning how to swim is best done in controlled circumstances.
How long would it take an adult to learn? Not get as good as Mark Spitz, but just basic water breathing, floating, and maybe two really basic strokes. I learned at a very young age so I don’t remember if it was just a few days or if it took the entire summer.
Ah, bless you! My Mom made sure we all got lessons, I made sure my two girls got lessons and now they are putting my grandchildren through lessons as well. They have thanked me several times for making sure they could enjoy the water and not be afraid. It’s like riding a bike, once you learn, you never really forget and you never know what life will bring you.
That’s how I read it too, especially given the last sentence, which implies that one would have a strong conscious motive for learning at least a basic “keep your head above water indefinitely” technique.
And yet, people don’t.
Many people think “I don’t like swimming” and know they don’t plan on going to the beach or the pool, so they think they don’t have to learn how to swim. Or their parents never teach them, and they never come to make it a priority in their own lives. and then something happens, somehow - they fall off of a pier, or a boat sinks, or a flood happens - and they drown. Inability to swim is a particularly serious problem among black people, but the percentage of other race/ethnic groups who can’t swim is also shockingly high (see link for stats).
My parents did not want me and my siblings to become such a statistic; they sent us to swimming lessons at a very early age.
When I taught adult beginners’ classes, it took at least a half-dozen sessions for basic water safety. And even then, I was never too sure what they’d learned would stick in a crisis situation; it really takes practice for that. Mostly we focused on basic water safety and what to do in a crisis.
If they stuck with it for several classes of that length, by that time I was more sure that they would retain what they had learned – and, more importantly, they had more confidence in the water themselves. By that point they’d struggle to get across the pool, and it wouldn’t be pretty, but it wouldn’t panic them.
The main problem in teaching adults to swim is overcoming their fear. It’s a bit difficult for them to remember to keep their hips up while floating, if they’re clutching the instructor madly because they’re now in 5 feet of water and the water is at neck height.
Same problem with kids, but kids weigh a fraction of what the instructor does. I can have two or three kids hanging on me and not go under; one big guy in a panic and I’m struggling to stay up.
Another issue is whether you are clothed or not. If someone falls into deep water fully clothed, including shoes, he/she may well be “negatively bouyant.” Many decades ago I took a lifesaving course, and the first thing we were taught was indeed self-preservation from a panicked person. Our instruction also included jumping into the water with clothes and shoes.
Fat floats. Bones do not float. Muscle tissue does not float. Lung tissue does not float. Lungs filled with air will float.
A person with a low body-fat percentage will sink unless they are making some effort to stay afloat. If such a person were to take several deep breaths to overload their body with oxygen, they could then sink to the pottom of a pool and sit there for a short period of time.
A person with a very high percentage of body-fat will require a lot less movement to stay afloat.
Everybody is buoyant. It’s just that not everybody floats on the surface.
I think that any non-swimmer who was placed in a pool deep enough to float in but shallow enough to stand with their head above water could quickly and without panic figure out how to propel themselves across the width of the pool without touching the bottom.
I’m thinking that while we need instruction, there’s got to be some instinctual level of knowledge going on. After all, quite a few land animals can swim with no intruction at all. And doggie paddling is a pretty intuitive way to get around.
On the “everybody floats” thing- I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about that.
I’ve been swimming since I was about 4. I’m perfectly comfortable in the water and started teaching my kids to swim when they were about 3. My wife is a former pool lifeguard; we’re all water rats. And I can’t float on my back. I take a deep breath and position myself on my back, arms spread to the sides and legs straight out, and face just sticking above the surface. In about 15 seconds I’ll be “floating” subsurface, head fully submerged. First my butt goes down, and it pulls me under from the middle. If I try to thrust my midsection to the surface, my lower legs and upper torso go under. I’ve legitimately tried numerous times and have had swim instructors scratching their heads, assuming I’m doing it intentionally. I’m not. For what it’s worth, I have a low body-fat percentage, but not like a long-distance runner, or anything. So maybe there’s something I’m doing wrong, but I don’t think so.
All anyone desiring to float needs to do is to lie on their backs, keeping their head above the water, being sure to maintain consistent breathing. No water-treading is needed. I have no use of my legs and I have absolutely no trouble floating (or even swimming for that matter).
Well, that’s part of the problem. Don’t try to get your legs and mid-section to float if they aren’t going to do it on their own. Like I said earlier, with a lungful of air, floating on your back might actually mean that your arms, legs, and lower torso are all dangling below your upper body. That’s natural, but the instinct is to fight it, which just makes things worse.
can you do a dead man’s float? If you can do one, youshould be able to do the other. After all, your density doesn’t change just because you flip over.
