Good for you. I do not float with out some treading or holding a big lungfull of air.
:dubious:
Your experience is not universal. Some people are dense enough to not be able to do that.
How can a corkboard not float?!
Incidently, for the doubters, this guy certainly is not floating.
(BBC Human Planet Spearfishing guy, somewhat impressive)
Can you float face down? Probably not. To prevent drowning, you only have to keep your head above water.
Your legs have no buoyancy. Your hips have no buoyancy. Fat floats and the air in your lungs provide buoyancy. If your overall displacement offsets your bodies ability to float - you can’t float.
Wow, that is impressive. And that’s in salt water.
I’ve had friends who took their infants to “swimming” classes, which apparently hypothesize that we instinctively know how to avoid breathing in water and float/swim as infants, but lose the ability as we grow. I’ve never looked into the validity of that, but it sounds unlikely and everything my friends described about the class made it sound like woo.
He or she is definitely wrong about the “everybody floats” thing.
While you’re floating on your back, you don’t want your hips to drop. Your legs (or arms) dangling down is okay. If your hips drop, your body follows. Try to keep your bellybutton at the water’s surface, and don’t tuck your chin (water should be between eyebrows and hairline on your face). And keep your lungs full of air.
By the way, your buoyancy will improve as you get older, as your bones get less dense. So maybe someday you’ll float.
I can’t, unless I put my face in the water. Otherwise I have to tread or swim.
I thought someone else was the newt. I just got some mild torture, and my torn ICL got fixed.
Your balance does though. You can float on your back well if your head is underwater. Otherwise it takes some practice.
What do you mean by “dense”?
In fresh water, if I hold my limbs motionless and exhale, I will sink to the bottom. If I hold motionless with a full lungful of air, I will float with just the top of my head out of the water - not high enough to actually be able to breathe. Even if I try floating on my back, the water still rises high enough on my face that I have to lift my head to breathe, and I’ll still sink below the surface completely if I exhale too far.
I have tested this on multiple occasions - mostly to prove it to my wife, who believed that everyone floats and didn’t believe me when I told her that it takes constant effort to keep my head above water. She naturally floats and needs no effort at all to keep her head completely out of the water.
Not everyone floats.
On the other hand, I can’t ever recall not knowing how to swim. I don’t like to swim much (partially due to the fact that it takes constant effort to keep my head high enough to breathe), but my parents made sure I knew how to swim from a young age.
Lean?
Some people have an average body density that is greater than water. Because of this, they are not naturally buoyant.
The mass per unit volume of a substance under specified conditions of pressure and temperature.
A substance more dense than water will not float in water.
Human densities vary depending (mainly) on overall fat content. Many people are so dense they will not float in water even when their lungs are fully filled with air.
By using limbs as propulsory appendages, they can swim. But they can’t float.
Your statements fly squarely against the fact that people drown in calm waters all the time because they can’t swim. If swimming were intuitive/instinctive for human beings, this wouldn’t be happening nearly as often as it does.
You need to learn the “dead man’s float”. It’s a survival technique designed to minimize the amount of energy expended to stay on the surface while waiting for rescue.
The hardest part is learning to control your breathing and to control your panic.
I grew up in a midwestern state, inland. There were some mud holes where people went swimming, but no real opportunities to swim in a large body of clean water. We weren’t ever taken to the pool because my parents refused to pay for things like pool memberships. They also refused to cart us around to do stuff when there was housework to be done. They would often promise tantalizing rewards (such as a trip to Lake Erie!) in exchange for chores around the house and yard, but after the chores were done, they were too tired, too broke, too something, always, to pay off the promised reward. My mom once took us to the Y to sign us up for swimming lessons. I don’t recall if the cost was prohibitive, but she certainly had a problem getting us to things that were on a schedule. I had to quit Girl Scouts because she couldn’t get me to a meeting every other week (actually, it was after school at school, so all she’d have had to do was pick me up a couple hours after school). So I don’t know if she couldn’t be bothered to take us to the Y six times in a row to get us through the course or if she couldn’t be bothered to pay the $2 per class per kid or whatever it was in the 70s, but either way, I never had swimming lessons and I don’t really know how to swim. She once lived in an apartment that had a pool and I spent a couple weeks in that pool trying to teach myself how to swim. I can make it across a swimming pool, but my form sucks, I have no idea how to breathe, and I can’t put my face in because I don’t know how to “steer.” Basically, I can sort of doggy paddle for short distances, but in an emergency, I’d probably panic and down. I finally self-taught how to tread water, so I might live for a little while, until I wore myself out. Now I live in Florida – and have for a couple decades – but I am too embarrassed to take swimming lessons as an adult, mostly because of the derisive tone of the OP. WTF kind of adult doesn’t know how to swim? That would be me.
My husband doesn’t really float. He took swimming as a kid, and at college. His instructors were unanimous. He doesn’t float for more than a second or two, then sinks like a rock. He learned the strokes for swimming, but couldn’t swim more than 10 feet before he’d be under.
Never heard of it.
Well, you had extenuating circumstances. I think it’s great that you want to learn. You’re not in Gainesville, by any chance?