Health & Fitness Blog

It is hard to believe that a mattress can be the cause of lower back pain, more specifically what many call morning back pain. The type of pain that is most acute in the morning when we first get out of bed. This is not normal. Sleeping is supposed to be a healing experience. If lower back pain is caused by the march of time and the effects of gravity over our lifetime then it should be most severe at the end of the day not the beginning.

For years I looked for some type of solution. I was thinking about trying anything – spinal disc decompression therapy, traction, inversion tables and was even considering surgery. Decompression therapy seemed like a good choice. The commercials on TV looked promising, then I discovered this type of treatment could cost up to $1,000 each month and was not covered by medical insurance. With each passing year the pain grew worse until one morning I could barely get out of bed, the pain was terrible.

There was no choice left, I had to do something. I had seen the ads on TV about inversion tables being used as a type of decompression therapy so I went out and bought the cheapest one I could find for about $100. I have to tell you, hanging upside down is not comfortable. Your blood rushes to your head and the weight on the back you your ankles can be painful. But in time you do get accustomed to hanging upside down.

It took about two weeks before I really felt an improvement to my back. Little by little it was getting better. I would even stop using the inversion table only to regret it some time later when the sharp pain would return in the morning again. So the inversion table did help but it did not solve the problem. I kept coming back to one nagging question. Why was my back pain most severe in the morning? I was beginning to believe my bed was the problem.

Finally I ripped off all the blankets and sheets on my bed and gave my mattress a very careful inspection. I noticed the mattress did have a slightly concave shape to it, like a very shallow bowl. I imagined this bowl shape was even more pronounced when my weight was on it. Could this be the problem? Seemed unlikely to me. When I was young I could sleep on anything without any trouble. But, I was not young anymore. Time to try a new mattress.

I considered many types of mattresses and beds before finally deciding on a memory foam (MF) bed but the cost was just too high for me. The prices of high quality visco elastic MF mattresses can be thousands of dollars. What if this did not solve my problem? Then I would be out a lot of money. With the Internet at my finger tips I did some research and found I could make my own MF mattress and platform frame and save thousands of dollars. In my case, this dreaded morning back pain was indeed caused by a bad mattress and a MF bed was the solution.

Learn more about memory foam, back pain and build your own memory foam bed projects.