Weekly Cup of Joe - Episode #28 - Q & A about Mattresses (Beds)

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Good morning, happy Wednesday, and welcome to your Weekly Cup of Joe. My name is Joe King. I'm the owner of Physical Therapy Advantage in North Aurora. I wanted to follow up our last cup of, Joe, which we talked about sleeping postures. One of the top 10 questions that we always get besides sleeping postures is, what kind of bed do we recommend for our clients? And, I don't want to make this a cop out or anything, but that's a really tough question for us to answer because we'll say, whatever supports you the best. There are so many different kinds of beds out there now, and the technologies just improved so much and there's so many options, but you've got your traditional Sealy or Beautyrest, you've got Tempur-Pedic or any other memory foam. You've got the sleep number, bed that's out there.

The ghost mattress or other mattresses in a box. Now you can just ship to your house, the purple mattress, which is the gel kind of waffle grid kind of thing that's supposed to be really high tech and really supposed to be good for you. So there's really no one clear cut answer for that. If you have the opportunity to go to a bedding store to get scan taken, that basically puts you in your preferred sleeping posture, whether it be in the side back belly, wherever, and they'll scan it for pressure points and they'll see how heavy you are, where you're putting your pressure at in your shoulder, your hips, trunk, wherever it may be. So if you can get one of those done and hopefully at no cost to you, I would highly recommend you doing that because that will let you know, give you a little bit of information of where you might want to start or what type of bed you may want to start with.

But overall, you want to get a firm to a moderately firm bed; something that's really going to support your spine and keep it in the good alignment, even when you're sleeping, whether it be on your side, your back and even on your belly, if you prefer your belly. But if you like the cushion, you like that softness that, oh, I just want that support and stuff underneath you., it's okay to have a pillow top. And that pillow top can be made of foam, can be feathers or combination of some sort. But you could have some cushion be a one inch, two-inch, three inches. However, how much ever cushion you want, on top of that firm or moderately firm mattress because that mattress is going to give you the support you need. And the pillow top is going to give you that cushion plushness that you feel like you want, that comfort you would like. You can buy egg crates and put it on your own on top. If you don't wan top buy it, already built into the mattress. So if you want to only put it on half, because your spouse likes it and you don't like it. So you could do something like that as well.

So, if your bed is basically 10 or 12 years old and you start and get some craters in it and some pothole and they're not coming out and they're just stuck there and you're falling into your hole there, it might be time for a new mattress or if you don't have that or, but your mattress is, 10, 12, 14, 15 years old or older, definitely might be something you want to look into is getting a new mattress, especially if you're having back and hip and neck issues. Because as a great therapist once told me many years ago, you don't cut corners on two things, shoes and your bed because you spend over half your life in both. So you want to get quality shoes, especially if you're on your feet a lot and you want to get a quality bedding system because sleep is so valuable and that's where you're going to rest and heal and recuperate and everything. So you got to have that good sleep. So hope that answers some questions for everybody and we will see you next week for your Weekly Cup of J