Best Mattresses For Gamers And E-Sports Enthusiasts

I get a lot of emails and messages from gaming enthusiasts and pro gamers asking me to give them tips on finding the best mattress, and of course, the best gamer chairs. Both of these are essential tools needed by anyone who is burning a lot of screen time. 

Mattresses often go unnoticed, though, yet they can be instrumental in healing your body from day to day to keep you alert, fast, and to keep your spine, neck, legs, even your wrists and arms- healthy and oxygenated.

As a professional mattress designer and bedding components expert, I’ve used my experience to custom build many mattresses for people who spend a lot of time working at desks from home or simply sitting for long hours performing tasks. Although I’m out of the custom mattress making game, I’ve put my expertise to work reviewing and recommending the web’s best mattresses. We’re going to take a look at a some excellent mattress options specifically designed to help with injuries and damage caused by extended sitting.

Usually, by the time people start asking me for suggestions, they are experiencing many of the symptoms that come with the territory. that includes back pain, neck pain, peripheral neuropathy (numbness) in the legs and arms, and more. Let’s face it, sitting stationary and spending ten hours straight on a PC is just as taxing on the body as running or climbing stairs is, with the primary enemy being gravity. 

Even as a content writer, I experience exactly the same ailments, and having the perfect mattress and the perfect chair ( I use one really awesome mattress as well several gaming chairs, but we’ll get to that further down the page) during marathon writing sessions that can last for 10 hours or more.

There are several reasons why we tend to repeatedly sit in ways that create tension and imbalance in our back and neck. This applies to sitting at work, in the car, and at home.  Sitting upright for extended periods of time not only damages your back, it also can create permanent neurological problems, such as mashed nerves, compressed musculature, compressed lymphatic vessels, and joint pain. 

Sitting also prevents effective venous blood flow from returning to your heart to get re-oxygenated, and because blood tends to pool in areas like the legs, blood clots can form in vessels. 

Plenty of twenty something gamers, office workers, and those who are medically required to spend most of their time in a wheelchair, expose themselves to higher incidences of  stroke and heart attack.

A new study revealed by Harvard University suggests that people who sit for 10 or more hours a day are more likely to have a heart attack or stroke than those who sit five or fewer hours each day. 

Extended sitting, especially when you are primed and constantly under the stress caused by intense gaming, for example, can start a cascading series of events in the abdominal core and legs that ultimately results in a host of medical problems. 

Weakening of our musculature is an obvious issue when we sit for extended amounts of time. The hip flexors are in their shortened position, which can keep the muscles in your butt, the glutes, from firing, which causes atrophy and weakness, causing your hamstrings to overwork themselves. This is what often explains habitual leg shaking, as our brain tells us to move certain muscles to compensate for long periods of inactivity.

This results in a phenomenon called anterior pelvic tilt (APT), which is an excessive tilt of the pelvis, or hip area of the body. APT can cause abdominal muscles to to become under used and weak, which will make the pelvis tilt forward, making the sitter look like they have a bigger stomach than they actually do. Literally, ATP is a disease of the sitting, and can be life altering if actions are not taken to relieve the problem.

APT can cause low back pain, poor movement mechanics (when you finally do get up to walk, do sports, or even engage in physical labor of any kind), and something called reciprocal inhibition (when one muscle on one side of a joint relaxes because the opposing muscle is engaged). 

The Best Mattresses For Pro-Gamers Spending 8 Or More Consecutive Hours Sitting Down

So, what can someone do who is spending a lot of time in a gaming, or even an office chair, to help improve or prevent further spinal, muscular, and neurological damage? 

One of the most important things you can do to avoid chronic back pain and increased damage to soft tissue, nerves, connective tissue, and muscles, is to make sure you get appropriate rest in between sessions. Also, you should take 15 minutes out of every 1.5 hours for stretching and/or lying down on a mattress designed to distribute weight load effectively.

Memory foam is temperature sensitive, meaning as you warm the material with body heat, it melts up around you. A properly calibrated memory foam mattress is not hot, since it incorporates cooling fabric technology or gel foam technology that can reflect or move heat away from the body. 

The characteristic subtle immersive quality of memory foam actually tricks the body into relaxing and unbinding the twisted cords of muscle, connective tissue, and joints that result during cast amounts of screen time.

Pain or discomfort when sitting down, especially if it gets worse after sitting for a long time. When side sleeping, by rotating occasionally from one side to the other, you’re taking pressure off these areas.

For best results, if you can tolerate it, try lying on your belly- it’s the best way to completely remove pressure and to allow tissues to re-oxygenate and decompress. It also allows lymphatic fluid to flow and remove toxins and other substances causing inflammation. Belly sleepers do really well on memory foam, as it is very accommodating and yielding. 

Note that all of the memory foam mattresses I recommend below contain additional layers of pressure relieving memory foam than the typical brands we are all familiar with. This will get you additional pain relief and pressure reduction across the important areas of your body that we are targeting: hips, shoulders, legs, and especially lower back.

my picks for best overall mattresses for pro-gamers, remote workers, or desk bound people