The Best Mattress Selection Guide for Athletes

When it comes to achieving peak athletic performance, you might eat right, exercise and train hard.

But how much thought have you given to you sleep? Athletes who get enough good, deep and high quality sleep tend to perform longer, are faster and more agile. In addition, the right mattress can help alleviate pain from injuries as well as improve blood flow so that the muscles and other parts of the body get the nourishment they need to keep performing at a high level.

So what’s the best mattress for athletes and which ones are worth considering? No matter what sport you play, buying a mattress designed for athletes will not only help improve the quality of your sleep but also speed healing and improve your performance on and off the field or court.

Let ‘s take a closer look at what to look for when choosing a mattress, as well as our top five picks.

The Importance of Cushioning and Alignment

For athletes in particular, mattresses that provide support to crucial pressure points, such as the:

• Neck
• Shoulders
• Hips
• Lower back

Beyond these key points, having a mattress that repels heat away from the body is also important for comfort and a better recovery. Many athletes tend to have a higher than average muscle composition, which in turn makes them weigh more, and sleep heavier. That’s why the best mattresses for athletes are designed to accommodate a larger frame and body size.

So with these points in mind, which mattresses truly stand out as top picks for athletes? Here’s what we recommend:

The Best Overall Mattress for Athletes: Bear Mattress

Have you ever had a sleep so deep that you “slept like a bear”? Of course you have! And that’s exactly what the Bear Mattress aims to create, a deeply cushioning experience without making you feel like you’re smothered or suffocated. With a 10-year warranty and 100 night in-home sleep trial, the Bear Mattress is neither too firm nor too soft and conforms to the shape of your body without feeling like you’re being sucked into the mattress.

In addition, the mattress does an excellent job at isolating motion, so even if you tend to be a restless sleeper, your partner won’t wake up to you tossing and turning. Beyond these key features, the core of the Bear Mattress, as well as its cover, are designed to help wick heat away from the body, so you sleep cooler and much more comfortable.

The mattress itself is made of both memory foam and high-density polyfoam, which allows it to provide superior support on key pressure points as well as the body as a whole. For these reasons, as well as its affordable price point and solid warranty, the Bear Mattress earns top marks for being a superior investment in your health and wellness as well as in giving you the sleep and care you need to perform at your highest level.

Best Mattress for Athletes Seeking Comfort and Pain Relief: Purple

With a unique ad campaign and innovation behind it, Purple is seeking to revolutionize how mattresses are made. With its “Hyper-Elastic Polymer”, it combines a top layer with a gel-like consistency to accommodate curvatures of all kinds, creating a kind of cradle for sore muscles and keeping temperature more even no matter which side you prefer to sleep on.

Purple has a 100-day in-home trial as well as a 10 year warranty and is made with pride in the USA.

Best Mattress for Athletes Who Have Trouble Deciding on Firmness: Layla

The Layla mattress has an ingenious approach for customers (and athletes) who have trouble choosing the right firmness for their mattress. That’s because the mattress has two distinct sides which can create two very different sensations within the same bed.

Want something a bit firmer? Flip it over. Need something soft to cradle pressure points? Give it a flip. The Layla mattress also has copper and a thermal gel infused into it, to help improve temperature regulation and create a more neutral sleeping temperature.

How Can a Mattress Help Improve Your Athletic Performance?

Deep, undisturbed sleep is by far the biggest contributor to helping speed healing as well as helping your mind-body connection for peak athletic performance. In addition to helping you perform better, you may also be surprised to learn that a key component of muscle-building actually happens while you sleep. So not only are you sleeping deeper, you’re getting stronger, too.

Just be sure that before you buy a mattress, you read the reviews carefully and understand the differences, as well as what you feel like you need most in a mattress. For example, many people believe that innerspring mattresses offer the best support, but they can wear out quickly and cause even more pain due to uneven weight distribution and unnecessary strain on joints and sore muscles.

It’s also worth knowing what type of sleeper you are, since certain types of mattresses tend to accommodate people differently if they are, for instance, a side sleeper versus sleeping on their backs.

The good thing is that the mattresses we’ve featured here have a 100 night in-home trial offer, so you can experience them completely to see which one best suits your needs and sleep habits. Whether you tend to prefer soft mattresses or firmer ones, memory foam mattresses or something more unique like a mattress infused with gel or copper, you’ll quickly see just how much of a difference your new mattress can make in terms of your athletic performance.

We invite you to read the reviews of all of the mattresses profiled here to help you better understand which type may be right for you. No matter which one you choose, you can be confident that everything in it is designed to help support, cushion and align, so that you can put optimum strength, power and agility into every movement.