Does age determine how long a person can swim under water?

[deleted-435163]

Hello,

My daughter's science fair project is, Does age determine how long a person can swim under water?:9 We looked on the internet and didn't really find anything. Then we went to 2 different book stores to see if they had anything under their science fair selection of books. But no such luck in this case either So I took her to the library and sadly there wasn't much information on the "specific" topic there either. I tried to encourage my daughter to change her topic. Being that her sister is a competitive swimmer she found this topic very interesting and she didn't want to give in. While we continued to search the lung section the librarian came to us. She was a ex swimming coach at the YMCA. She was kind & had printed us some material as to why the YMCA is AGAINST this type of training for swimmers. She had also printed the flip side of the study from other professional coaches as to why they disagreed with their argument. But again non of this information left us with any research that pertained to her project.

We searched information adult vs child lung capacity however the terminology was too advanced for my daughter to understand.

We came home and re worded our search. We got lucky from the Michigan board of health. It was minimal but something. It was also about drowning but it was about lung capacity under water. We also found 1 more from another person who had done a science fair project through either youtube or vivo. We searched any which way our brains could think of.

Could you please offer some sort of insight? I wasn't feeling well and couldn't sleep tonight so I thought I'd jump on here and do some more searching. That's when I found out about Ask the Expert:) I don't want to simply give her the information but it would be great if I could help guide her in some sort of direction.

This science fair project has been a long process for her. Because of her participants had difficulty doing her project the was she wanted it she went from them just holding their breath while staying still under water, to holding their breath while floating on the water, to now holding their breath while swimming under water for her project. Although it has been a little intense around here (because she is learning to manage change) I LOVE this experience because she is growing in so many more areas then just science:)

[deleted-284605]

Hi Foullio,

Did you see this page from the American Lung Association? http://www.lung.org/lung-health-and-dis ... aging.html Perhaps a bit complex for your daughter but it is written for the general public so maybe she'll get something out of it.

I also found this paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl ... 03-253.pdf, which is way too complex but has a nice graph on the fourth page that can stand alone.

This site has a lot about lungs for kids, though not about volume/capacity or age: https://kidshealth.org/en/kids/lungs.html#

This one is also for kids and has a bunch of interesting facts, though again, not specific to your topic:
http://www.sciencekids.co.nz/sciencefac ... lungs.html

Hope that helps a bit!
Megan