Health Issues: How to choose a mattress

Since we spend a great portion of our life sleeping, I am often asked  how to choose a mattress.  There are many new options for mattresses, Air, memory foam, combo foam are some of these choices.  While they are very viable, they can be very expensive and may not provide the best fit for you.  I generally recommend the tried and true spring mattress.  When thinking of mattresses, we need to have support and it needs to adapt to the contours of our body.  As a general rule, the more springs in your mattress, the better.  The reason is the springs provides the adaptability  to our different shapes.  Stiffness to a mattress is generally controlled by the gauge or thickness of the springs.  Like wires, the smaller the gauge, the thicker the steel used in the coil.  Since most companies use the same size gauge on their mattresses to allow it to adapt, I don't usually concern myself too much with that.  My bottom line rule is, get as many coils as you can afford.  In other words, if I had a choice of 700 coils in a queen size mattress or 800, I would buy the 800.  There is even one company (Duxiana) that puts up to 3000 coils into their mattress.  While this would definitely offer better contouring to the body, the cost is very high.  The springs need to intertwined by hand as I understand it.  My other recommendation is to go with the top of the line model with in a company, for instance Sealy Posturepedic.  Within the Posturepedic line, there are many bells and whistles, the extras that can add highly to the cost.  Having fancy pillow tops does little for the overall mattress but are expensive add ons. 

To complicate your sleeping choices, mattress companies will often put different names on a mattress depending on which store they are selling to.  Macys, Sleep Train may have the same mattress, only named differently which makes comparing them difficult. 

So there it is, I do not recommend any particular brand as all companies usually have different levels of mattresses and it is almost impossible to judge a mattress after lying on it in a showroom for 5 minutes.  Use  the springs numbers to help you compare.