We all love a day on the beach but with young children of course playing in the water constantly can lead to them getting cold very quickly. This is because water conducts heat away from the body roughly twenty five times more efficiently than in air. It therefore makes sense that your children wear kids wetsuits to help preserve their heat.

Popular Kids Wet Suits:

O'Neill Reactor kids full body wetsuit for surf, scuba, snorkel, swim

Girls UV Protective Tuga Thermal Sunsuit

Boys UV Protective Tuga Thermal Sunsuit

Kids Wet Suits work by trapping a layer of water between the wet suit and your skin which is then warmed by your own body and will then act as an insulator. It is possible that children unprotected could easily show the symptoms of hypothermia - how often do you see children shivering with a towel around them on a hot day?

Wet suits are made out of a synthetic rubber known as closed cell foam neoprene which contains small bubbles of nitrogen gas. This gas has a low thermal conductivity so it will reduce heat loss form the body.

Today some kids wet suits also contain titanium fibres and merino wool to increase the heat retaining characteristics of the child wetsuit. This enables the suit thickness and weight to be kept to a minimum.

The neporene wet suits must be a good fit to work effectively, it is no good putting your child in one two sizes too big as it will allow the water to escape with subsequent loss of body heat. Usually kids wet suits come with good flexible seals at the lankle and wrist cuffs to aid water retention and thus retain heat.

Kids wet suits have one other great advantage in that neporene itself is very bouyant which will help yoru child, particularly if they are weak swimmers, to stay afloat.

Divers using wet suits have to take this into account when achieving neutral bouyancy during a dive . they also have to be aware that as they go deeper the notrogen bubbles are compressed and thus the suit will lose boith bouyancy and thermal insulation.

rip curl wetsuits

History of the Wet Suit

Originally, wetsuits were made only with raw sheets of foam-rubber neoprene that did not have any backing material. This type of suit required extra caution while pulling it on because the raw foam-rubber by itself is both fragile and sticky against bare skin. Stretching and pulling excessively easily caused these suits to be torn in half. This was somewhat remedied by thoroughly powdering the suit and the diver's body with talc to help the rubber slide on more easily.

In open water swimming events, the use of wetsuits is controversial, with many participants believing that wetsuits give some swimmers a competitive advantage (by increasing their buoyancy and hydrodynamic curve). Some open water swimmers, in fact, believe that wearing a wetsuit is contrary to the spirit of the sport, and that people who wear the suits should be the objects of derision.

Unlike triathlons, which allow swimmers to wear wetsuits when the water is below a certain temperature, most open water swim races either don't allow the use of wetsuits (usually defined as anything covering the body above the waist or below the knees), or put wetsuit-clad swimmers in a separate category and/or make them ineligible for race awards. This differs in locales and times of the year, where water temperatures are substantially below comfortable


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