It kind of surprises me that you were taught the dead man float first. I guess that’s kind of ripping off the bandaid, but at the same time, it seems like that would be extremely scary for a kid to put their entire face in the water right out of the gate. Did you have any trouble with that?
I guess some kids are more relaxed than others. My son, 6, still occasionally wraps his arms and legs around me while swimming even after a year and a half of consistently working on swimming. His sister on the other hand is 2.5 and asks me to dunk her to her eyebrows in the big pool and fights me to let her swim on her own without her inner tube even though she doesn’t yet use her hands in the water much. Kids are weird.
These comments by QtM are in response to my posts saying I had no trouble floating. Now I am very muscular and in some respects, exceptionally skinny.
Now, QtM is saying that some people cant do what I can because they are too “dense”. Now what I am to infer from this?? Especially given the bolded parts.
I don’t remember a lot about learning to swim, but I remember being asked to put my face in the water. I had a lot of fear over it, but the instructor was very patient. We didn’t start out at a full float, but maybe chest deep. We were first asked to hold our breaths and quickly dip our faces. We worked up to prolonged dipping with blowing bubbles and opening our eyes. I think that was the very first thing we learned.
I don’t think I learned the dead man’s float until years later.
That your buoyancy is primarily but not solely determined by your body fat. Its ratio in relation to muscle and bone mass, as well as bone density also affect your buoyancy. And if you’ve got a good lung capacity, lungsfull of air will also alter your density.
Alternatively, you might not be as low on body fat as you think you are.
It can happen in the right conditions – I had an uncle who died (this was long, long before I was born) during a fishing trip. He gave up his life jacket to someone else because he was the only one in the group who could swim. Sure enough, the boat capsized. Everyone else survived but him.
I’m a pretty “meh” swimmer, in that I kinda sorta taught myself to swim when I was a kid, and had swimming lessons in high school. I can float, but I have to kick if I want to keep my head above water. So, I can swim, but I’ll never be a pro.
My mother is terrified of water. She’ll usually sit in the shallow end, and go in no deeper than her waist. She’s claustrophobic, and she said that water triggers it. That being said, she still likes to go to the pool, and we always had a pool pass every summer when I was growing up. (Mainly because of me and my sister). We practially went every day.
I was eight. iirc we started by just bending over in shallow water and putting our face in. Then gradually immersed more and more of our body. I recall practicing the days lessons in the water after class ended. I seem to recall learning to float on my back then they taught us the back stroke. Always swam crooked with the backstroke. didn’t have a even stroke at all.
I’m a ok swimmer, but very slow. I qualified for my mile swim badge three different summers at Scout camp. I was always the last swimmer to finish. Really pissed off the guy they paired me with. They always required a buddy partner for the mile swim.
The overall density of a person with high body fat will, indeed, be less than the overall density of a lean person. The obese person will have more mass, yes. But also more volume. That mass/volume for the obese person will be lower than the mass/volume for the lean person.
I’m a head-above-water dog paddler. I can do a frog-stroke or basic freestyle in a pinch, to qualify for going off a water slide, but not for extended no-feet-touching-the-bottom swimming. The problem is I have nostrils that do not naturally seal off water, so I get an influx of water through my nostrils and down the hatch every time I put my head below water, and a nose clip does not properly stay on my nostrils to help any.
I have this problem too. I have to constantly exhale through my nose if I’m moving at all. If I very gently lower my head in a vertical position, I’m ok.
I noticed something interesting the other day when I did my how poorly do I float experiment.
When I exhaled and was standing on the bottom in about 8 feet of water, I could feel a part of my brain panicking. It was like “oh shit, we are underwater and out of breath…we could die!”. And every time I did it, that part of my was not happy at all.
Now this was under very favorable conditions. It was only a couple of feet to much shallower water, little current, fairly clear water, and probably 20 people within 50 feet and five or so in the water with me only a few feet away. I’ve been playing in water on regular basis as long as I can remember. I’ve done a fair bit of scuba diving and being underwater while breathing never bothered me. I have been in a handful of situations in the water where I probably had every right to panic but did not. I respect the water but I don’t remotely fear it.
If, under those conditions, if I was not that far from freaking out, I can see how pretty much anybody else could with just a bad moment or two.
I remember when I was around 18 years old I was living in Dakar, Senegal, which is on the coast. I’d always been able to swim ever since I could remember, and while in Dakar my sister and I spent many of our days body surfing, which is riding a wave in by using your body as a kind of surf board.
Many was the time that a wave crashed over me, I was under the water and didn’t know which way was up, but somehow, for some unknown reason, I was never afraid. Ever. The thought that I could drown just didn’t occur to me.
Then one day we were with friends on an unfamiliar beach, and one of them suggested we all swim out to a sandbar he said was just beyond the crashing breakers. So we all did – it must have been 100 yards or so. But there was no sandbar. And when I looked towards shore, I saw that I was much further out than I thought I had been. But I just started swimming as hard as I could towards the shore. I began to become really afraid – I thought “I might not be able to come out of this.” And then I saw that the current was pulling me away from the beach and propelling me towards rocks – five- or six-foot waves were crashing directly on them. I would have been smashed like a rag doll – I would certainly not have survived. But I still didn’t panic. The thought of something that would cause me to drown just simply didn’t occur to me. I redoubled my efforts to swim to the beach and somehow I managed it, as did we all.
It was only after we were all sitting safely on the beach that we began to confide in each other how scared we were, that almost every single one of us – me excluded – thought they were going to drown.
Nowadays it would be very, very different. I know very well that it’s possible to drown. Perhaps the ignorance of that possibility is what saved me – I didn’t panic, and panic may have gotten me drowned. So I’d say yes, we are all born with the innate ability to swim, but it’s panic that does everyone in.
Eh, I know how to swim. Under the right circumstances. I loved swimming as a kid but it was also an embarrassing time as I had to swim with goggles AND nose plugs. Can’t keep my eyes open or water out of my nose for anything. It also took me a while to learn as a kid, one day in elementary school I just “got it”.
Now as an adult I still have do the goggles/nose plug or face mask thing to swim. I do swim fast though and since I spent many a summer pretending to be a dolphin, I can do all kinds of strokes and tricks and whatnot.
I was a weird kid who turned into a weird adult:cool:
My body must be non-human. I am a poor swimmer, but if I jump in a freshwater lake, I don’t go down. Sure, it’s hard to keep my head above water without motion, but if I stop moving, I don’t sink. If fact, if I want to dive, it’s difficult to go deep, as my body seems to want to rise, not sink. If I ever drown, it won’t be because I sank, but because I inhaled too much water on the surface.
Floating is not a problem. It just comes naturally.
The only time I ever panicked was when I fell off a stand-up JetSki in big waves and couldn’t swim to shore because of the extreme waves and swift littoral current. I yelled, “Help!” but the wave noise was so loud no one on shore heard me. I just kept trying to swim and eventually made it to safety. But I’m still not afraid of the water, just more careful.
You would think that zombies float, but I have read descriptions of a famous zombie movie in which they traversed the ocean floor from one coast to another.
Was that zombies? I remember there was something in one of Ann Rice’s vampire books, but I would think that the zombies would be skeletonized by the time they reached the other side. Fish, unlike Dopers, aren’t all that picky.
I swim poorly, I have swam all my life, surfed, rafting etc, I don’t like to be far from shore without a life preserver. The ocean I can float or tread water but not in frsh water. I can swim fairly fast for maybe 10 laps in a regular back yard pool but thats about it.