> Then my feet slowing hit the bottom of the pool, this startled me and it occurred to me I could jump and maybe catch the edge of the pool.
A really startling story. That is one of my nightmares as a parent. I really need to learn my kids to swim soon.
I wonder if you could actually stand on the bottom with your head over water if you tried? Like it is really hard to "jump" under water. And you don't really sink until your lungs are filled with water (I believe?).
In general, at least some ability to swim is a pretty basic skill. It should happen much earlier (and it did in my case) but my undergrad required passing a swim test or at least taking the Phys Ed course.
While it's beneficial to learn swimming as young as you possible can people should be encouraged to learn it later too if they are at least mildy interested in water. I learned to swim very young pretty much on my own and thought I was decent, but it was only after taking some technique classes later on that made swimming longer distances actually enjoyable to me.
Swimming as competitive sports never interested me at all, and unfortunately the training aspect of swimming is way too often hardlinked with it. And many other sports hobbies suffer from the same "this is a pipeline to create professional athletes from children" mentality.
I was never a "good" swimmer. I was fairly negative buoyancy as a teenish and barely got the one mile Boy Scout patch at one point. Never had any interest in competitive.
I agree with what I think your basic point is. Swim well enough and comfortable enough so you probably won't drown in a trivial water situation or even doing stuff like canoeing/kayaking and that goes a long way.
Maybe it's my background but you end up in a river or a lake sooner or later. Or you step off into something that's a bit deeper than you expected. It seems pretty stupid to not be prepared for something that seems basically normal life for a lot of people that doesn't actually require a huge amount of work.
If you exhale you’ll probably find you sink quite well. And ‘jumping’, even just using your feet/ankles will be enough to move you up 5-8 feet. Give it a try (assuming you can swim!)
It also depends on the type of fat. People with high density fat (like me) can be 100 pounds overweight (or more), and still be negatively buoyant. I have to work to stay afloat.
My wife has low density fat, and she can't sink or dive for love or money.
Generally (assuming a healthy weight) women float and men sink, due to women having a few percentage points more body fat. I imagine children sink as well as men though.
For high school wrestling we got body fat analysis done. The, fit and healthy, women on the team were in the %30s while men down to the single digit %.
Fit women (just regularly fit, not even athletes) have body fat percentages in the 20s.
And unless all of you had been cutting for an event (in which case, why weren't the girls also doing that?), I highly doubt all the boys on your team had body fat percentages in the single digits. See e.g. this random sampling of NCAA wrestlers[0] with an average of ~14% body fat even excluding heavyweights.
Not to mention that describing high school students as "men" and "women" casts a fair bit of doubt on this story ever actually happening.
Yes, that's what I'm saying - unless you are quite obese, your body fat will not be so huge a factor that it will cause you to float with your lungs empty. You might not sink quite as far but still.
Many years ago my toddler fell into the deep-end of the pool and just gradually sank into the water, not even making a fuss. I was right there so I grabbed her and pulled her right out, but it's now seared into my memory like a slow-motion video I can never erase. Teach your kids to swim ASAP if there's any chance they'll ever be near a pool.
A really startling story. That is one of my nightmares as a parent. I really need to learn my kids to swim soon.
I wonder if you could actually stand on the bottom with your head over water if you tried? Like it is really hard to "jump" under water. And you don't really sink until your lungs are filled with water (I believe?).