Mattress firmness is one of the first and most important criteria that you must understand and use while shopping for a mattress. This is the term that is extensively used by the customers, manufacturers, retailers and even by the reviewers. You will find this term to be the most nuanced discussion when you go through the reviews and articles that are published on reliable and reputed sites such as Realmattressreviews.com and others.
However, you may not know what it really means and how it really matters when it comes to choosing a specific mattress and determine its health quotient. Well, this guide will change that and make you more knowledgeable about the detailed description of firmness and how it matters when it comes to numerous other important issues such as comfort, support and above all your health.
The firmness and support
A few answers will help you in this aspect.
- Firmness: This described the feel of the mattress with relevance to comfort. Imagine sleeping on a concrete floor and then sleeping on a cloud and you will know what firmness means. However, this is a subjective term because the way a person may feel comfortable may be different from the way another person may feel comfortable. Therefore, it is important to see the different levels of firmness to find a model that will suit your preferences in the best way.
- Support: You may feel that firmness is same as support while it is not actually. This is also a very important point to emphasize on as support refers to how well the mattress promotes the spinal alignment. Firmness on the other hand refers to the degree of feeling of comfort while you sleep on the mattress.
In simplest terms, firmness is the measure of how soft a mattress is. It means, firmness is highly subjective but support is not.
The firmness scale
The firmness scale of a mattress is another point that you may have come across but do not know the true meaning of it. This is the scale that determines the terms such as “extra firm,” “medium-firm,” “plush,” and others to tag along a mattress. The firmness scale rates a mattress in a scale of 1 to 10. This is the breakup:
- 1 – Means extremely soft with lots of sink to be called a plush mattress and are quite rare
- 2 and 3 – Means soft with definite sink
- 4 to 6 – Means medium firm with some plushness but more limited sink
- 7 to 9 – Means firm and much harder mattress with limited sink and softness only
- 10 – Means extremely firm with no softnesssink or plushness in it and this is also rare to find.
To sum up, firmness of the mattress will determine the sleeping positions that you tend to change unknowingly throughout the night to look for the comfortable position that the mattress may not have at all. The need of firmness in a mattress will depend on your sleeping positions such as a side sleeper, back sleeper and stomach sleeper.