If a person reads a lot of theory about how to swim, different types of techniques, other people’s written experiences etc., can they swim if thrown in a deep swimming pool? Or, at least, be able to swim enough to reach the steep end and save themselves from drowning?
By “a lot”, I mean spending over 6 months to a year, gaining theoretical knowledge. And when we throw them in the pool, they are willing to try it, as in, “I have learnt enough, and I am willing to try it out.”
Based on some real-world knowledge, no.
For example, there’s this class that military helicopter pilots take as part of training for surviving water landings. They have the body of a helicopter which can be dropped into a big swimming pool. The pilots strap in, they’re dropped into the pool, and they have to unbuckled and exit the helicopter.
So many people fail this, repeatedly. Scuba divers are in the pool just to extract the people who can’t make it out. The issue is that when you panic, you tend to stop thinking rationally; it’s why swimmer lifesaving is so dangerous - a panicking swimmer will do anything to save themselves, including grabbing the lifesaver and trying to climb on top of them, which can result in both people drowning. In the pilot case, people panic and can’t unbuckle themselves, straining against the restraints to get out, until they have to be rescued. Even if they start well, trying to unbuckle, if they fumble at the restraints, they can panic and then they stop trying to unbuckle. Even though the helicopter is only a cockpit and a bay with big van-style doors, people panic and get lost trying to get out; they just can’t find the bay doors, and have to be rescued. For these night tests, you can’t see which was is up, and people panic and forget to take time to orient, and swim toward the bottom of the pool, and have to be rescued.
All of the theory in the world can’t protect you from panic; the only thing that helps is experience. You do it enough that you get used to it and have confidence that keeps the panic at bay.
Studying isn’t enough, because the first thing that goes when you panic is your ability to think rationally, and the only way to prevent panic is confidence, and that’s developed through experience. It’s why teaching always includes homework: you have to exercise the knowledge for it to become second nature.
Hitting particularly cold water makes it even worse.
I doubt someone who has only ever read about swimming could do it in deep, cold water. But they are talking about taking it to a swimming pool to practice. I think they’ll be fine.
Yeah, but if you’re doing it in a swimming pool to practice, then you didn’t learn how to swim by reading about it. You learn how to swim by practice, which is how everyone learns how to swim
Well, yeah. But they could also skip the books; the practice will be much more useful.
You can’t watch your form in a mirror, in a pool. Well, Elon and Bezos probably can, but most normal people can’t. So you can’t tell how you’re doing, if you’re trying to actually swim well. Having an instructor, or even a friend who knows a little about swimming would even be better than any amount of book reading.
I’m all for book learning, but I doubt many people learned to ride a bicycle by reading a how-to first.
If they’re going to spend time trying to learn to swim, that time is better spent in a pool, than reading about it.
I think I have had an instructor put a mirror in the pool before lol
Being put in a situation meant to induce panic with restrains, gear, and objectives is very different from surviving if someone falls into a body of water.
Sure, reading a book probably won’t do much if you capsize in rough waters or have tread water for minutes to hours. I think that if someone were to have a controlled drop in a deep pool, they would have a much higher chance of success if they’ve read about basic water survival techniques vs someone who hasn’t. Panic is still for sure the biggest factor, but having any amount of knowledge is still better than having none.
Most of the people who get into trouble in the water and need to be rescued already know how to swim. My point wasn’t that they should be afraid of swimming, it was book learning isn’t going to help, and what they read in a book is going to be the first thing to go if they do panic. Which is likely what will happen if they read a book thinking they’re learning to swim and then go try it.
Go to a pool. Get in the shallow end and practice putting your face under water. That’ll be far more useful than reading about how to do a breast stroke.
For sure, swimming and practicing swimming is the best way. Reading about it won’t likely help you in an emergency situation. In a controlled environment, I think that someone could probably survive if they’ve only read about how to swim. Not thrive, but knowing what to do would help.
Yeah that egress training is horrible, never done it myself but know a few who have. Starts off relatively easy, until they flip it upside-down and turn off the lights to simulate night. Even the strongest swimmers have trouble.
Also lost a high school friend when they jumped in to save someone struggling in a lake and were pushed under. The person they were trying to rescue survived but they didn’t.
For example, there’s this class that military helicopter pilots take as part of training for surviving water landings.
This is nothing remotely like the scenario OP is talking about.
You don’t learn muscle memory from books. Just go to watrr and try to float.
The same way people can learn to dance while reading a book.
I’m going to disagree with everyone here. Loads of people throughout history have learned to swim by literally being thrown in. It’s not a good way to learn, but people do it. Even babies can do it.
Given a little bit of reading first, you’d do just fine. Yeah, the motions might be a little off cause it’s hard to learn a complex movement from a book, but it would be good enough.
In the immortal words of Mike Tyson, “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
No matter how much you study, landing in the water will change everything.
Reading will nevertheless help. It’s not going to give you perfect form on your breast stroke, but that’s not what OP is going for here. He wants to not die if he suddenly finds himself in deep water. There’s plenty of benefit from reading about how to go about not dying under those sorts of circumstances.
Sure it will help. But by no means did you learn how to swim through theory alone.
Which is kind of the whole point of this post
The point of this post is to ask whether reading about techniques is enough to “at least, be able to swim enough to reach the steep end and save themselves from drowning.”
And yes, yes it is. It’s not going to make you a good swimmer but it will certainly allow you to accomplish that.
They learned how to swim by being thrown in.
Which would by definition be a form of practice.
Which means they learned how to swim by practice.
Which means they did not learn how to swim simply through theory. They first had to practice and then apply the theory they learned, which is still learning by practice.
The spirit of ops question would be reading and learning about it and then being able to jump in the pool and swim without practicing, immediately. Because if you cannot and you first have to practice then by the very statement of this sentence you learned via practice.
I am skinny - if I am not actively swimming in fresh water I am sinking (sea is different but sea comes with waves which is an added complication). If I am tired or nervous then I have to fight with my subconscious to be calm and stay safe. So I would add mental strength to the list for a first time swimmer. And even then I’d say don’t go out of your depth.
Ha! I’m skinny too and my wife always tells me, floating in water is just a learnable skill
I’m just drowning as well…even if I try to control my breathing to stay afloat, my legs will drop and it’s just a constant struggle to stay tensed, breathing while trying to keep a full lung to have more volume…
She meanwhile just floats by relaxing and doing nothing.I’m still not sure if it’s really just technique or her boobs are acting as a life vest…
Yeah, it’s really frustrating when someone with higher body fat that floats like a cork tries to tell you how to do it.
Technique can’t overcome density. I will say that I got slightly better at it after learning to SCUBA dive (or maybe I just got fatter). In scuba, you move up and down in the water column by adjusting the range of your breathing. You basically try to get your neutrally boyant setpoint at 50% lung capacity. To go down, you try to control your breathing from 0-50% and to go up, you breathe from 50-100%. It made me slightly better at keeping my lungs really topped up with air.
To float, I basically have to hold my lungs at max capacity, and then exhale-inhale as fast as possible, which is unnatural and takes concentration. I usually have to use my arms for a little bit of upward thrust through that breath.
There’s no lungs in my legs, so those will sink no matter what. People claim you can “use your core” or some other BS to keep your legs afloat, but the fact of the matter is that if your upper body is positively buoyant and your lower body is negatively buoyant, there will be a rotational moment pulling your legs down, and it can only be counteracted by external application of force (i.e., kicking your feet). I can either float on my back with a mild amount of kicking, or i can do like a face-in-water deadman float, and just pull my head out of the water occasionally to quickly breathe.
Hehe, that’s exactly where I got my idea from to control my breathing to try to float ;-)
Like an internal dive jacket
Just like many physical things, not really.
A huge part of your brain is dedicated to motor skills and hand eye coordination. You aren’t going to improve or learn these things until you actually do them. It’s neurological, you can’t move a muscle you don’t have neurological connections for, it’s a learned skill. And you cannot learn it without actually doing it and making those connections.
Imagine never letting a baby crawl, and you just teach them about crawling, walking, running…etc once they’re old enough to understand. But they have never moved yet in their life.
They would essentially be disabled, none of the neural pathways necessary for the movement they need to do have been developed. These would need to develop from scratch, by struggling and failing.
Everyone here that says yes and then mentions practice is not getting your question.
The spirit of your question would be reading about it and understanding the theory and then dropping yourself in the middle of a lake. And either you learned and you swim to shore or you drown.
I’m sure most of the people here that are mentioning practice would understand that you would just drown and that you would not actually have learned how to swim.
I do a lot of research on random things. ADHD urges me to go into deep dives on very niche subjects that I don’t really have any experience with. On the rare occasions that that research becomes applicable to my actual life, I do feel that I am more skilled than a complete novice would be. I still need to get the practical practice in but if I understand the core theory of something first, its way easier for me to pick it up first try.
All these “absolutely not” responses are silly, IMO. I speak as someone who’s quite a good swimmer. Practical experience is important to get good, certainly. But if your main objective is simply to not sink and to have a basic ability to propel yourself, I think that’s stuff you can manage quite easily starting from pure book learning. The “not sink” part is key, because that will give you the time to actually experience what it’s like moving around in the water and clarify what that book learning told you.
You probably don’t need 6 months of study, at that point your time would be better spent finding an actual pool. The sorts of basics I’m talking about here that would be useful is stuff like how to float with your face in the air so you can breathe, and once you’ve got that part down how to efficiently kick your legs to propel you rather than just flailing around uselessly. Learn those key tidbits, drill on just that, and then if you find yourself unexpectedly tossed in water you’ll know what to do to not die and get yourself back to the edge.
There’s also the mental load to take into account.
If it’s your first time in water, you’re prone to panicking.
Especially when your head gets submerged for the first time.
So I think even if you integrate all the theory, you still need to be very careful and slow on your first try for this to succeed.
There’s a difference between already developing motor skills and then trying to improve those motor skills by learning from the skills of others.
And having not developed those motor skills and then trying to learn them from the experiences of others.
If you have never crawled or walked your entire life, you can’t learn how to crawl or walk just by reading about it. The neural pathways literally don’t exist for you to be able to balance and move. You would need to actually do the physical actions to develop those neural connections for those motor skills to develop.
A significant part of our brain is dedicated to controlling our body, not just to knowledge and thinking. Those portions of our brain largely develop alongside us actually moving and practicing motor skills.
You could learn technique and what you’re not supposed to do as long as you have all the prerequisite motor skills relate to that information. If you are missing the prerequisite motor skills then you will not be able to.
That last part is where many of these “Absolutely not” answers are grounded.
Someone who is able to walk around and control their breathing already has those prerequisite motor skills.
There was a German mathematician who allegedly managed to do it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Kaluza
Strange stories were told of his private life, for example, that he taught himself to swim during his thirties by reading a book about it and succeeded at his first attempt in the water.
I very much doubt it would but it would likely help to some degree. I can say I did not learn till late in life and am a horrible swimmer but do a decent backstroke and side stroke which are, to me, the more useful basic swim strokes. Learning to float on ones back is most of whats needed for a backstroke. The stroke itself can be fast or slow. Most people can be in neck heigh water and just relax to allow their feet to stop supporting them and keep their face and mouth above water. If they fill their lungs with oxygen the chest should naturally go up to the surface as well. Thats like with the worst body shape.
For any skill, no matter which, the more theory you know the more accelerated your learning rate will be. But it doesn’t inherently teach you a skill.
having knowledge =\= learned skill
having knowledge -> increased perception of mistakes/inaccuracies while learning -> more rapid rate of mistake/inaccuracy correction == accelerated learning rate
In a way you could say that theoretical knowledge is equivalent to having talent in terms of what effect it has.
I firmly believe I was way more prepared to ride a motorcycle because I spent countless hours reading about techniques before I got on one.
So… Maybe.
Into a pool? Yeah, it really isn’t that hard. Plenty of people manage to get in their first time after verbal instructions and make it short distances.
You won’t have great form, and you’ll probably wear yourself out fast because of it, but as long s you know ahead of time that there’s some basics that even a dummy can do to stay afloat while you rest, you’d be fine.
Wouldn’t even take six months. If there was a book written with basic techniques, described well, you could absorb that in however long it takes you to read.
Panic would be the barrier, not knowledge. But knowledge can sometimes prevent panic, so it’s totally doable.
I mean, fuck, I know people that have started out with way more complex movements with nothing but reading up and done well for a first timer. If there’s illustrations, it’s even easier.
Possibly. But there is a good reason that is not the way swimming is taught and I’d not jump in the deep end based on book knowledge.
That being said read, then practice, then read, then practice loop is a very quick way for me to learn.
I think: no.
With no experience, one will get stressed out and make uncontrolled movements. A save environment is needed for your brain to say “that ain’t half bad”
You couldn’t ride a bicycle by reading due to a lack of motor-skills, I think that swimming is the same, but due to a lack of mental-skills
