Sleeping on the right mattress

Finding the right mattress to suit your body and sleeping habits is essential to back health and also to getting a relaxing and uninterrupted night of sleep.

Until quite recently the general consensus of opinion on mattress support was that a mattress should be firm or even hard. This view held for many years and most still have the opinion that an overly soft mattress is not good for the health of the back, muscles or other parts of the skeletal structure.

What a mattress is supposed to do has however been open to much debate over recent years and the very firm mattress has now become less favoured. Orthopedically the "perfect" mattress should support the back in its natural figure S shape and a firm or hard mattress is no better at doing this than a soft one. In fact it may be less suitable!

New mattress materials

The last 20 years have seen a new material called visco elastic memory foam introduced into the world of mattresses and this material is thought by many to have superior orthopedic support qualities to conventional mattresses.

Visco elastic memory foam compresses and shapes itself around the person sleeping on it and its sensitivity to weight means that it curves and profiles around the natural shape of the body and not the other way around.

Because of this, memory foam beds are perceived to have very good orthopedic properties and they rest the back and spine in its natural shape. This also holds true for the other parts of the body and the material has the ability to constantly adapt to whoever is sleeping on it in whatever position.

Another similar and comparatively new material to the world of mattresses is Latex foam. This pliable material can also shape itself around whoever is sleeping on it and it provides the same kind of contouring support as memory foam.

In summary, what both of these mattress material have is the ability to shape themselves around the person sleeping on them rather than forcing the body to adapt to the flat surface of the mattress. This means that they can keep the important muscles, organs and joints of the body in the most natural and rested positions to ensure the best kind of sleep.