Mattress too firm? We tested 4 toppers for 46 nights on my mum's bed

"It's like lying on the garden path, Denise." That was my mum on the phone in July, four months after she'd paid £649 for a new double mattress. The man in the bed shop had told her firm was good for her back. At 81, with one dodgy hip and a shoulder that has never forgiven her for 30 years of hanging washing out, she believed him.

By summer she was waking at four with her left hip throbbing and her arm gone dead. The shop wouldn't take the mattress back once it had been slept on. And Mum, being Mum, wasn't going to spend another £649 on a bed. "I'll just get used to it," she said, which is what she's been saying about things since 1962.

So we put her bed to work. Four of the best-known toppers in Britain, one too-firm mattress, a bungalow in Beeston and 46 nights, from 15 August to 29 September. One question decided the winner, the same one that's been on our tests in progress page since August: which topper makes a too-firm mattress kind to hips and shoulders, without sinking, for a fraction of the cost of a new one?

Why "firm is good for your back" hurt Mum

I spent twenty years on night shifts, and I lost count of the patients who came in from home swearing by a rock-hard bed. It's one of those bits of advice everyone's nan passed on. The evidence doesn't back it up. A Spanish trial published in The Lancet in 2003 put 313 people with long-term low back pain on either firm or medium-firm mattresses for 90 days, and the medium-firm group did better.

Side sleepers have it worst. Lie on your side on something hard and your hip and shoulder take nearly all your weight, while your waist hangs in mid-air. Darren, the physio on our team, sees it in his clinic in Huddersfield every week, mostly in women over 50 with sore hips.

"A good topper should let the shoulder and hip sink in just enough for the waist to meet the bed. Too little and you're lying on two pressure points. Too much and the spine sags into a hammock." Darren Ackroyd, physiotherapist, who wrote our protocol for this test

That's the balance we were looking for. Soft enough to take the pressure off, firm enough that an 81-year-old can still get herself out of bed at three in the morning. Here's who turned up to try.

The four toppers on test

We bought all four in a UK double, at normal shop prices, like we always do. Prices below are for a double at the time of writing, and they move a lot with sales.

Simba, Emma and Panda all give a 10-year guarantee. Simba and Panda have an anti-slip base and elastic corner straps. On paper the Silentnight looked like the best deal on the list: the deepest foam for the least money. Remember that. Getting four rolled-up toppers into a bungalow, it turned out, was the easy part.

How we ran 46 nights

Mum was the sleeper and I was the nurse with the clipboard, which suited us both. She's ten minutes from me, so I was round every two or three days with my kit, and on the other nights she filled in a big-print diary sheet on the bedside table before she put the kettle on.

• Nights 1 to 4: bare mattress, to get a baseline. The toppers sat unrolled in the spare room, breathing out their packaging smell.
• Nights 5 to 40: nine nights each, in the order we pulled the names out of Mum's tea caddy: Panda, Silentnight, Emma, Simba.
• Nights 41 to 46: a rematch between the top two, swapped each evening under the same sheet while Mum watched the telly in the front room, so she only knew them as A and B.

Every morning Mum scored her hip and her shoulder from 0 to 10 and noted how often an ache woke her. On my visits I measured the gap under her waist as she lay on her side, how far a 5 kg weight sank into each topper and how fast the foam came back. Then the surface temperature after an hour, and each topper's height once fully expanded and again at the end.

One test was my idea, not Darren's: from lying on her side to standing beside the bed, timed on my phone. On the ward that's the number that tells you who'll struggle at night. Every sleep test we run follows the same routine and scoring sheet, written down on our how we test page.

The results, side by side

Here's the whole test in one table. Mum's scores are averages over each topper's nine nights. For aches, wake-ups, waist gap and getting up, lower is better.

Two things jump out. Every topper helped, a lot. Even the one that came last more than halved Mum's hip ache. And the Silentnight has the best waist gap on the table and the worst numbers for getting up. Those two facts are the same fact, and it's the whole story of this test.

The winner: Simba Hybrid Topper

The Simba went on in the last block, so by then Mum had slept on three toppers and had opinions. On the first morning she rang me before eight. "This one pushes back," she said. That's the springs. Instead of a slab of foam slowly giving way, you get a layer of tiny coils under the foam that let the hip and shoulder in, then hold them there.

The numbers agreed with her. Hip ache down to 1.9, shoulder to 2.0, and only four nights out of nine when an ache woke her at all. Her waist gap closed to 1 cm, which Darren called "about as good as you'll get on a side sleeper". Under the 5 kg weight it sank 3.2 cm and bounced straight back the moment I lifted it.

And it was the only topper that made getting out of bed easier than the bare mattress: 8 seconds, against 9. On a slab of hard mattress, you have to roll and lever yourself up. On the Simba she just swung her legs round. It ran coolest of the four too, 30.3°C at the surface after an hour, which won't matter to Mum, who could sleep in a sauna, but would to me.

In the A and B rematch at the end it was the Simba against the Emma, three nights each. Mum scored B higher on all three mornings. On the second one she wrote "B is the bouncy one, I'm not daft" in the margin of her diary, so much for the blindfold.

The downsides are real. At around £299 for a double it's the dearest of the four, and it's heavy and floppy to fit. Steve carried the boxes in from the car and said a word about the Simba one that I won't print.

It's springy, too. When my sister's lad came for tea and sat bouncing on the end of the bed, Mum felt every bounce from the pillow, so think twice if you share with a restless turner. Still, it costs less than half of the £649 mattress it's sitting on, and it made that mattress usable.

Emma Comfort Topper: the safe second

The Emma is reversible: one side is softer, one is firmer, and you choose by flipping it. On a too-firm mattress there's really only one choice. I tried the firmer side for two of its nine nights, just to be thorough, and Mum's hip went straight back up to 4.4. Back to the soft side it went.

On the soft side it was very good. Hip ache 2.9, shoulder 2.7, and fewer than one wake-up a night. It's a calmer feel than the Simba, a gentle, even give with no bounce at all, and Mum found it easy to get out of, just a second slower than the bare mattress. It held its shape almost perfectly, losing 1 mm over the test.

Where it lost to the Simba was the deepest part of the job. On her worst hip nights, Mum could still feel the mattress under the Emma, a dull pressure rather than a throb. Its 100-night trial is a big plus, though. If you're unsure whether you want soft or firm, or you're buying for someone else, that's a lot of time to change your mind.

Panda Cloud: a lovely cover on too little foam

The Panda was first out of the tea caddy, so it had the hardest job: following four nights of garden path. It still cut her hip ache from 6.1 to 3.9 and halved the wake-ups. Mum loved the soft bamboo-blend cover, which she kept stroking "like a cat", and it's the easiest to live with: light, held in place by its straps, and fresh as new after a 40°C wash.

The trouble is 5 cm. From her third night, Mum could feel her shoulder go through the foam to the hard mattress underneath. Under my 5 kg weight it sank 3.6 cm out of 5, which leaves little in reserve. For a mattress that's only slightly too firm, or a lighter sleeper, it's a good buy at around £140. For a mattress like Mum's, there isn't enough foam.

Silentnight Impress 7cm: three good nights, then the hollow

For three nights, this was Mum's favourite. Seven centimetres of slow memory foam wraps around you like a warm bath, and the waist gap disappeared almost completely. Her hip ache over those first three mornings averaged 1.7, better than the Simba's 1.9.

It was also the warmest: 33.2°C on the surface after an hour, three degrees above the Simba. Mum loved that. My mother's thermostat is permanently set to Tenerife. If you sleep hot, as I do, you'd feel it by midnight.

Then the hollow arrived. Memory foam that soft lets you sink further as it warms, and by morning Mum was lying in a dip with her pelvis lower than her shoulder. From night four her hip scores crept back up to just over 3.

Getting out was the real problem. Mum needed 14 seconds from lying down to standing, five more than on the bare mattress, and the foam took 11 seconds to fill back in. I timed myself too: 12 seconds, and I'm 24 years younger than she is.

By the end it was 7 mm thinner than when it arrived, the most of any topper. And its cover was a wrestle to zip back on after the wash, a complaint I found in plenty of owner reviews.

None of that makes it a bad topper. For about £100 it's the cheapest way to soften a hard bed, and a light, cool sleeper who turns over easily will love it. For anyone who needs to get out of bed safely, I'd spend more.

So which one is for you?

• Simba Hybrid Topper if your mattress is properly hard, you sleep on your side, you get up in the night, or you sleep hot. The one I'd buy for Mum, and now don't have to.
• Emma Comfort Topper if you want a calmer, bounce-free feel, share the bed with a restless sleeper, or you're buying for someone else and want 100 nights to be sure.
• Panda Cloud if your mattress is only a bit too firm, you're on the lighter side, or a washable, soft-feeling cover matters a lot to you.
• Silentnight Impress 7cm if money is tight, you sleep cool, you're light and agile, and you love that slow, sinking memory foam feel.

Before you buy any topper

A few things I learned over six weeks of hauling foam round a bungalow.

• Give it time to expand. Rolled toppers need at least a day to reach full height. Ours took between 24 and 48 hours, and the Silentnight smelt of new foam for most of a week. Open the window.
• Give it more than one night. Mum's back took about three nights to settle on every topper. Judge on night one and you'll pick the wrong one.
• Check the trial. From 200 nights at Simba to 30 at Panda, while for the Silentnight it depends on the shop's returns policy. Keep the box flat behind the wardrobe until you're sure.
• Turn it round. Head to foot every few weeks helps it wear evenly, just like a mattress.

If heat is your real problem rather than firmness, I spent a whole British summer on the subject in my Eight Sleep Pod 5 review. And you can see what's on our bench right now on the tests in progress page.

After 46 nights

On 29 September I went round to pack up. The plan was to take the winner home for our long-term check, which is what we normally do. Mum had other ideas. The Simba had been B on the final night of the rematch, and it was still on her bed, made up with her good sheets. She was sitting on it with her arms folded.

Her hip scored 2 that morning. She says she didn't wake with a dead arm on a single Simba night. So the long-term check is happening in Beeston, and I'll report back on how the Simba is holding up in the spring. The other three have gone to a family shelter in Nottingham, cleaned and in their covers.

As for the £649 garden path, it's still under there. Mum says it's "a very good base", which is the closest she's ever come to admitting the man in the bed shop was wrong. More of what we've tested for sleep, and for everything else, is in our reviews.

Mattress topper questions, answered