Question About Progressive Bed

[phoenix]

Hi floridamattress,

I do have some mild soreness in the morning with the new bed, but its not as bad as it was on my old bed. My main “symptoms” are that it is hard to get comfortable and fall asleep at night, and that I am not waking up feeling well rested.

I’m not sure where your soreness is so it’s difficult to know what it may be pointing to. The post I linked earlier though has more information that can help you “connect” any symptoms you may be experiencing with their most likely (although not necessarily the only) causes.

In the store, we did lay on the mattress for about 15-20 minutes several times, and my back didn’t tense up at all. Should someone feel some degree of discomfort within that amount of time if a mattress would be likely to cause them problems?

This would make sense because it sounds like your current mattress is keeping you in relatively good alignment (or at least none of the comments you make seem to indicate lower back issues which is the most common “alignment” issues so your testing was probably fairly “accurate” when it comes to alignment). While spending 15 - 20 minutes on a mattress and testing specifically for posture and alignment, pressure relief, and “comfort” in all your sleeping positions and knowing what to test for will generally be “close enough” for most people that only minor fine tuning is needed if it isn’t quite right (such as a mattress pad or in some cases a topper of some kind) … nothing is perfect so for those that have a more narrow range of support or alignment that is most suitable for them (they are closer to what I call the “princess and the pea” end of the range than the “I can sleep on anything” end of the range) then the goal would be to get as close as possible to recreating and predicting their sleeping experience as much as possible. “Comfort” and pressure relief issues are usually easier to assess in a store than alignment issues because in general comfort and pressure relief are what most people tend to notice when they first lie on a mattress or first go to sleep at night and alignment issues are what most people tend to notice more when they wake up in the morning so they can be a little more challenging to discern. The best approach to test for alignment is a combination of visual and experiential cues.

I understand it is impossible to predict something as subjective as comfort for another individual. I probably wasnt clear in my question regarding construction. Maybe rephrasing to something more objective might be better…In your experience, do you think that type of construction would have enough deeper support in the middle and bottom layers to maintain alignment despite a soft top layer?

There is really no way for me to know this because there are just too many variables and unknowns. For some people with certain body types, weight distributions, sleeping positions, and physiologies it would certainly be a suitable choice and for others it may not be. It all depends on whether the primary support, secondary support, pressure relief, and “comfort” fits your body type, sleeping positions, and preferences (there is more about primary and secondary support and their relationship to pressure relief in post #4 here). There are so many variables that there really isn’t any way to know based on specs.

If I was to know more about the specific “symptoms” you are experiencing on your current mattress, more about your body type, weight, and weight distribution, more about your sleeping positions, more about your sleeping history, more about any issues you may be prone to or tend to experience when you sleep, and more about the specific materials inside your current mattress and the mattress you are considering (including many of the “comfort specs” that I don’t know), and if I was familiar with all the specific materials, … then I would have at least some frame of reference that I could use to “guess” at the types of changes that may be helpful (thicker here, softer here, firmer there etc) but I don’t have any personal experience with either mattress (which is where their knowledge and experience would be much more helpful) and I don’t have nearly enough information about you, the specifics of the mattress you currently are sleeping on, or the mattress you are considering to even guess.

I wish I could (and there are many people in the industry that would love to have a “formula” of some kind that could predict these types of “theoretical” questions based on the specs of different people and materials) … but unfortunately this kind of formula just doesn’t exist so it always comes down to either your own personal testing or experience or when you can’t test a mattress in person then the “best judgement” of a manufacturer or retailer that can use the “averages” of customers that seem to be similar to you to help you choose a mattress that would have the highest chance of success … for those that “fit” inside the averages.

Phoenix