I don’t know how you were taught to swim but this suggests it was pretty bad.
Yeah you may never willingly go near water but knowing how to swim, or rather being comfortable in the water, is not a bad thing to have.
It is simple (really…you instinctually know how even if you are unaware of that).
Plus swimming is awesome. Great fun, great exercise even if you do not mean to exercise.
Of course you do not have to if you do not want to but a good swim instructor (indeed most…dunno what was up with those who stuffed your head in the water) will make it utterly safe and as comfortable as possible. If you get to Chicago I will teach you…will take an hour.
I panic because in the back of my mind, I am nine years old again, and the after-school-program instructor who swore he’d help me if I got into trouble has once again lied.
My kids started swim class when they were little. The non-swimming bit stops here. I stay out of deep water, which often means staying out of water. I know I’m missing out, and I’ve tried taking classes, but every time the water is deeper than about a meter fifty I turn into a nine-year-old again
Yeah…I said I could teach BigT to swim in an hour but if a phobia is involved then probably not as that is a whole other issue.
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Best I can suggest is if you are phobic about water and want to overcome it then take it in baby steps.
Take baths.
Try a hot tub.
Wade into shallow water up to your ankles or knees.
Sit on the steps of a pool in the shallow end.
Swimming is fantastic. If you are of a mind to I think you can get comfortable around it. Maybe not 100%…my mom was always phobic about it but she made sure we all had swim lessons and all her kids are part fish. For her part she floats well and got content backstroking around a pool with no regard for the depth…she would never, ever put her head under water though. Still, she was able to enjoy a pool and I think you might be able to as well.
That said if you are just not interested then that’s fine too. I encourage you to try but by no means expect you (or BigT) must.
This is why I can’t swim. I cannot stand the feeling of water in my ears, not just in the ear canal, but even in the dips and plains of the pinnae and even in the shower or when washing my hair, I avoid getting water in my ears as much as possible. (No, earplugs don’t help.) I panic, jerk my head up, get off balance and start to sink. This has been a lifelong situation.
I can be in five foot deep water (or so) without a problem. I can paddle around. I’m glad to do so. I don’t need to do anything else.
I’m 29 and can’t swim in the normal way, despite lessons every summer up until I was 19. My grandpa even tried throwing me into the deep part of the lake so I’d either sink or swim. Lake bottoms are so muddy to a 7 year old. The only result of that, aside from hearing my mom cuss like a sailor, was that I realized I loved water.
Now, I can float on my back, and on my stomach. On my back I can move about by sweeping my arms through the water and kicking my feet. If I try that on my stomach I sink. I can somewhat swim on my stomach, if I move like a frog. Find a video of a frog swimming through the water, and that’s what I look like. It’s not pretty, but it’s good enough to allow me to have fun in water that’s over my head.
I can swim fine, but I did the test you were supposed to do to show that anybody can float. We did it in high school. You float on your back with nothing out of the water but your face. I sink - slowly, but inevitably.
I believe nowadays they teach you drownproofing rather than survival floating.
I always loved the water but had never been taught how to swim, my sister and I had always been given a floaty of some kind and we played in lakes with them all the time. A lot of the lakes where I grew up in Tennessee were formed by dams and the ones we went to actually had old paved roads that went into the water and generally you could go 100 - 150 feet away from the shoreline and only get into 5 foot of water or so, IF you stayed on the road.
One day I stepped off the road and found myself in deeper water. I wanted to scream and could not, I needed to go about 2 feet and could not. I bobbed for a bit trying to stay alive, swimming or doing anything sensible did not occur to me, I was gripped in fear, and I slipped under.
I came to on the bank throwing up what seemed like tons of lake water, my uncle had seen me go under and had gotten to me and pulled me out. He was only in town a few days and really yelled at everyone for not teaching us how to swim, until he found out no one in my family could swim.
He stayed for a month and taught me basic stokes and from that summer onward I swim like a fish.
Happy ending. Everyone needs to learn to swim and if you think you can’t, stay away from water and boats forever.
When I was about 12 year old a group of us went to the public pool. At the start of the session they required everybody to swim one length of the pool to have deep water privileges. I had never swum before, but not wanting to be embarrassed, I jumped in the deep end with the group. What a shock as I discovered that it did not immediately come naturally to me. After taking in some water and having an adrenalin rush, I figured out how to dog paddle enough to get into shallower water where I managed to get to the edge. My level of skill has never improved because of lack of opportunity and interest. Also, my percentage of body fat is almost nothing so I don’t have the natural flotation that many swimmers enjoy. For survival reasons, I avoid the water and always wear a flotation device when on the water in a boat.
I still contend that anyone can float on their back with their lungs full of air once they learn the proper technique. I just got back from my 6th year as an adult leader at Scout camp. I have yet to see anybody, of all shapes and sizes, skinny or fat, tall or short, fail to learn to float on their back once they relax, take a deep breath and hold it, and look straight up instead of trying to look forward.
What you have just described is called floating on your back. See Figure C in this link. That person is doing exactly what you have described, and he is floating on his back. Floating on your back does not mean that your body is horizontal.
People have this misconception that floating on your back means that your body is horizontal, your back is straight, and that your whole body is somehow supported evenly across the water like you are lying in a bed.
Not true. Very few people have enough buoyancy in their legs to get their legs to float if you’re just lying still, floating on your back. When you float on your back, your back is arched, and your legs drop down below the surface.
Again, see the pictures in this link. As implied by the pictures, most males float like Figures B and C in the link. Females generally have an easier time because they usually have more body fat, and it’s strategically placed.
For those who always sink, don’t exhale! If you’re having trouble floating, take the deepest breath you can and hold it. When you can’t hold your breath anymore, rapidly exhale and take another deep breath as fast as you can, and hold it again. A person can keep this up indefinitely. Heck, if I exhale while floating motionless, I sink, too. Many people do. It’s not uncommon at all, and it doesn’t mean that you can’t learn to float motionless.
Once you get this down, you can learn to do small sculling motions with your hands that will make it so you don’t even have to hold your breath like I’ve described.
No, you didn’t, unless you are posting from beyond the grave. Drowning is like electrocution–you only get to do it once, and you don’t get to do anything after that except to attend your own funeral.
So true. More than once, friends of my son have nearly drowned this way at our local pool. We just assume everyone can swim because we are a swimming family so when we invite one of his friends we don’t think to ask. I’ve watched a kid (maybe 8 at the time) jump in the pool and sink to the bottom, never even moving his arms. I was paying attention, thank goodness, so I jumped in and pulled him up but the lifeguards didn’t see anyone struggling so they didn’t react. Turns out the kid had never been in a pool before and had no concept of deep water. I’m still wondering what he was thinking as he sat on the bottom of that pool.
Floating and swimming are two completely different things. Competitive swimmers will sink like a stone due to the low body fat so you don’t need to float to feel comfortable and safe in the water.
I have a horror of drowning that I control by being able to swim. I would never go on a boat, for example, if I didn’t think I could stay afloat until help came.
Your instructors were idiots. That’s not the proper way to teach someone to swim.
Putting someone in a position where they can get into trouble is also not the proper way to teach someone to swim. A person can learn to swim in water shallow enough to stand up in. A student should never be brought into deeper water until they are skilled enough to make it back to a pool edge or to shallow water with no assistance required.
I’m not very overweight, but I do have a fat gut. I float so much that it’s hard for me to stay underwater. I can swim down to the bottom of the pool but once I touch it I feel like I’m being yanked back up with a chain. I can jump into the water cannonball style and, without changing position at all, bob back up to the surface. So for me it’s the opposite problem: I can’t sink.
A big bunch of years ago, I got the idea in my head that I was going to do a triathlon (a half, not the full marathon part). I was taking fancy swimming lessons to help me with my technique because I can swim but, frankly, I suck.
There was a guy like you: Mr. Sinker. The guy was strong and fit and a good swimmer, but when it came to drills that required basic floating, he sank like a stone even though he was doing everything right from a technical standpoint. The coach thought it was amazing and attributed it to some kind of crazy muscle density and very low body fat. We wasted almost an entire class experimenting with trying to get the guy to float.
If the guy used his arms, he was fine. But whenever we did exercises like, just being face down in the water and kicking our way across the pool, he would just get lower and lower and lower below the surface as he went along.
You got to it before I did. I’m a sinker, but if I take a big lungful of air I become neutral and can swim beautifully underwater. I’m as fast, or faster than most non competitive swimmers underwater and far more comfortable than floundering around on the surface trying to figure out which way my head is supposed to go. That caused me a lot of problems as a kid in classes, since they were quite focused on trying to teach children “proper technique”. It didn’t really apply to me since I was more comfortable and far more energy efficient just under the surface. I’d tire out quickly trying to stay on top, but where I’m comfortable I can swim for hours.
For those who are scared, start out in the shallow end where you can stand up and just get used to sitting in the water. Then put your face in and open your eyes. Then crawl around on the bottom like an alligator for a while. If you get scared, stand up. Eventually you’ll get comfortable with how your body moves in water and learn to swim. Anyone can do it.
Yeah it’s kind of weird really. I eventually found a class that taught people to swim on the basis of their natural comfort positions. The floaters did the breast and backstrokes, the majority did freestyle, and few sinkers practiced extended diving and underwater swimming techniques. After that it was hard to get me out of the pool as a kid, and that has continued into adulthood. I’m an excellent free diver and snorkeler since it takes very little energy for me to move about underwater.
Even bricks float in Manitou Lake. Just don’t expect to come out feeling clean.
People don’t swim (much) in the Saskatchewan rivers because 1) despite looking placid there’s some nasty currents that will get you into trouble (in the North more than the South), and 2) the water is generally kinda stinky and unappealing (in the South more than the North). The family farm is just a mile from the South Saskatchewan, and we’d go down to the river to play around as kids, fishing or just clambering over the rocks and through the trees along the riverbank. It was never tempting to go swimming.
That’s what it seems like from my observations of others as well. (I think I’m part dolphin; learned to swim at 3 or 4, spent all my summers at the pool until college, and swam competitively from about 7 through about 15).
That was the biggest thing I remember figuring out- that if I don’t flail, it doesn’t mean I’m going to immediately sink and drown. Once I realized that and learned how to do the dead-man’s float, the rest was just how to move the arms and legs.
Oh, and as for floating; when I was about 15, I’d float if I had a deep breath of air, and sink if I let it out. I think it’s entirely a muscle/fat ratio thing.
My aforementioned coach also pointed out that panicked novice swimmers will often instinctively try to “stand”. Basically, they go vertical trying to put their feet on something as if they are in shallow water and this can make them go under without much apparent fuss to those who may be watching.
I got to witness this first hand too, when a young woman from the class that’s one step below mine (it was a class where they were learning how to swim in deep water, so their first real foray in the deep end of the pool) started to go under.
I was standing on the ledge at the end of the pool catching my breath and heard someone say “Bottle fed.” I turned my head to see the girl had been swimming to the wall using the front crawl, misjudged the distance, and got nervous. She totally straightened up vertically, made one big reach for me/the wall with a messy front crawl stroke and started to sink in her vertical position. With her head going under, she meant to say: “BAAAAAAH — SAVE ME!” but as her mouth dipped under the surface, it came out: “bottle fed.”
I tried to catch the hand she was reaching to me with, but her instructor (who had been observing and had already rushed over) grabbed the hand she was holding straight up in the air, so he just pulled her over to the ladder. So she didn’t even really get a snort of water up her nose. All the instructors were awesome, so they’d be right next to you before you even realized that you were in trouble.
Neither of my parents (who are both in their 70s) know how to swim. In their case, it was because their own parents (wisely, in retrospect) kept them away from public swimming pools. Knowing how to swim is nice; not getting polio is nicer.
Of course, that’s not much of an excuse for those people born after the Salk vaccine came out…
See Figure C in this 
Drowning is like electrocution–you only get to do it once, and you don’t get to do anything after that except to attend your own funeral.