Last updated: Jan 22, 2026
I was told I needed six months off....
I'd love to have seen the doctor's face when I was back in the gym the next day
CONSTRUCTION WORKER'S STORY — By Lee Thomas · Jan 8, 2026
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Published on: Jan 8, 2026
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Lee, 42, has spent over a decade working construction — the kind of job where a bad joint isn't just painful, it's a threat to your paycheck.
When a repetitive strain injury in his elbow started flaring up on site, he knew exactly what was coming: months of downtime, a boss who wouldn't wait around, and the one thing outside of work that kept him sane taken away with it.
Elbow pain is hell.
Three months ago I was sat in my van in a Wickes car park, engine off, just staring at nothing, because I genuinely didn't know what I was supposed to do with myself anymore.
That sounds dramatic for an elbow injury, I know. But it wasn't really about the elbow.
"It was about everything that was about to get taken off me because of it, and there wasn't a single thing I could do to stop it."
I'm a construction labourer. Have been for years. It's repetitive strain by nature of the job — everyone in the trade knows that eventually something's going to give, you just hope it's not you, or not yet.
My elbow had been niggling for a while, that dull ache you get used to and start telling yourself is normal. And then one day it wasn't a niggle anymore. It was this sharp, electric pain every time I gripped anything, followed by this dead, heavy ache that spread right down into my forearm..
You already know the exact feeling.
The grip is fine right up until the second it isn't. Then it's that sharp, electric catch the moment your hand closes around the bar — and after, the dead, heavy ache that spreads down into the forearm and just sits there.
It doesn't stay at the gym either. It's there lifting the kettle. Carrying the shopping in one trip because you always do. Turning a key. That flat, low ache in the evening, hours after you've done nothing to deserve it.
And the worst part isn't even the pain...
It's the maths you start doing in your head. How many weeks. How much you'll lose. Watching everything you built start slipping backwards while you sit still — and knowing, because everyone keeps telling you, that sitting still is the right thing to do.
That's the bit that actually gets you. Not the elbow. The fact that the advice is right, and you still can't follow it — because the gym was never just training. It was the one hour a day your head went quiet.
The one place work couldn't reach you, bills couldn't reach you, none of it could.
Take that away and you're not losing a hobby. You're losing the thing that was quietly holding everything else together.
And the dread underneath all of it — the one nobody says out loud — is: what if it doesn't come back? What if this is just how it is now.
I ignored it as long as I could, because that's what you do when you need the wage. But eventually I couldn't lift a bag of cement without wincing, and my boss noticed. Of course he noticed.
And in this trade, once they see you managing an injury instead of just working, you're already halfway out the door in their head. There's always some 19-year-old who'll do it cheaper and hasn't got a bad elbow yet.
I genuinely thought I was going to lose my job...
So I went to the doctor, more to get signed off than anything, and he told me I had something similar to golfer's elbow — a repetitive strain injury — and that any real grip work was going to keep aggravating it.
"He said 5 to 6 months before I could think about lifting a dumbbell again" — if I wanted it to actually heal properly.
I remember him talking me through stretches and rehab exercises and I wasn't hearing any of it. "I was just stuck on those two words, six months, playing on a loop."
I'm not an emotional person, I don't really cry, but I'll be honest — I had to sit in my van after that appointment for a good twenty minutes before I trusted myself to drive.
The part nobody actually explains
Here's what took me way too long to work out on my own. My back still wanted to work. My legs were fine. It was one stubborn tendon that had decided it was done — and it didn't matter how strong the rest of me was, because everything ran through that elbow first.
And it only ever hurt when I gripped. Not when I moved my arm. Not when I stretched it. Only when my hand closed around something and pulled.
That's the thing. It was never the movement loading the joint. It was the grip.
Because here's the thing nobody without an addiction to the gym really gets. It's not vanity.
For me it's the only hour of the day where my head goes quiet. Work stresses me out, bills stress me out, and the one place I've never had to think about any of that is under a bar.
"Take that away and you're not just taking a hobby, you're taking the thing that was holding everything else together."
For pull day especially — back and biceps — that was always my day. Two of my best body parts and the day I actually looked forward to all week.
The idea of that being gone for half a year, maybe permanently if it never fully healed, that's what actually broke me a bit if I'm honest.
So why doesn't just resting it work?
Because resting it works fine — for the elbow. The problem is what resting costs.
Rest the joint and you also rest everything attached to it: the pull days, the progress, the one hour that kept your head straight.
"Rest it" and "stop training" end up being the same sentence.
Unless you could take the grip out of the lift completely — and let the joint sit the set out while the muscle carried on working.
Regular Straps Won't Save You
Obviously, like any sensible person facing six months off, I went straight to the gym the next day to see if the doctor was maybe being overly cautious.
He wasn't. I couldn't do anything that involved gripping. Deadlifts, rows, pulldowns — all off the table instantly, the second my hand closed around anything my elbow lit up like someone had hit it with a hammer.
I could just about manage pressing if I kept my hand loose and barely gripped at all, and honestly, pathetic as it sounds, I'd have taken that over nothing.
I tried the obvious things first
I even tried my old lifting straps thinking they might save me. They didn't. You still have to grip the bar with straps, you're just gripping through fabric, and my elbow didn't care about the fabric.
That was the point I properly panicked, if I'm honest. Not the doctor's appointment — this. Because it finally felt real. Standing there in the gym realising the straps I'd used for years weren't going to save me either.
Everyone around me — mates, family — kept telling me the same thing: just rest it, let it heal, it's not worth risking permanent damage. And they were right, obviously they were right, I knew that.
But knowing something's the right advice and being able to actually do it are two different things when resting means less money coming in and losing the only thing that keeps your head straight, both at the same time.
I wasn't looking for someone to tell me to be patient. I needed a way round it, not through it.
I spent a stupid amount of time down a rabbit hole after that, googling anything I could think of — repetitive strain injury weightlifting, how to train back without gripping, even looking into weird bits of fabric I could rig up myself to wrap round a bar and pull with my elbow instead of my hand.
There was nothing. Every search just led back to the same advice: rest, ice, wait it out.
I understood the logic. I just wasn't built to sit still for six months, and I wasn't willing to risk my job finding out the hard way.
One evening, I was scrolling Facebook trying to switch my brain off and take my mind off what my future was going to look like, and an ad stopped my thumb dead. It said something like: it's not your muscles that are the problem, it's your grip.
There was a clip of some bloke with a steel hook thing strapped to his wrist, clipping it onto a bar and just pulling — no gripping at all, his hands were fully open.
I'd never seen anything like it. I'd written off straps already because I needed grip for those, but this looked completely different. "The hook was doing the holding, not his hand."
So what actually let me train again?
Not a cure. Not a treatment. Just a different way of holding the bar.
The hook holds the bar — not your hand. Your hand rests on the hook, open, no grip, no pressure through the joint. The load runs through the hook straight to the muscle and skips the whole grip chain — fingers, forearm, elbow.
The injured bit comes out from under the weight. It gets to rest — properly — while your back carries on doing the work.
I clicked through to the site and had a proper look, but I wasn't sold straight away, not even close.
Most of what I read was about lifting heavier and doing more reps, which wasn't really my situation. I wasn't trying to hit a new PB, I was trying to save my job and my sanity.
I was skeptical too, if I'm honest. It felt like one of those products that looks great in a thirty-second clip and falls apart the second you actually put weight through it — and the last thing my elbow needed was some flimsy bit of gear snapping mid-set. So I closed the tab and left it.
Why I trusted it enough to try
The ads kept coming. Same brand, different videos, over the next couple of weeks. Different blokes using them on rows, on pulldowns, on deadlifts.
Then one popped up of a guy pulling what looked like a proper heavy deadlift — 220-odd kilos — using nothing but these hooks. That was the moment my scepticism actually cracked.
"You don't put that kind of weight through cheap gear, not without it failing on camera in front of thousands of people. Something that could hold that much load wasn't going to argue with an injured elbow doing a light cable row."
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So I ordered a pair. They had a guarantee, so I told myself worst case I'll send them back and I'm back to square one — which at that point felt like a risk worth taking against six months of nothing.
They turned up the next day and I won't lie, I was straight out the door to the gym with them before
I'd even properly understood how to use them. I picked a cable row first, felt like the safest place to start. Clipped the hooks on, sat down, pulled.
Nothing. No spike, no ache, none of that electric feeling in my elbow at all. Just my back working — and properly working — in a way I hadn't felt in months.
I moved onto lat pulldowns after that, same story. No pain, no bracing for it, just this pump in my back that felt borderline unfair after everything I'd been through the previous few weeks.
Within the first month I was already matching some of my old numbers on rows. Within two I was beating them.
An injury that was supposed to keep me out for half a year, and I was in the gym the day after the hooks arrived, making progress within weeks — all while actually giving my elbow the rest it needed, because it wasn't the one under load anymore. I'm writing this on month four.
My elbow feels normal again, and I'm training like the whole thing never happened. I picked up a bag of cement on site last week without even thinking about it until afterwards, and that's when it actually hit me what four months ago looked like compared to now.
Building Something Better
My boss stopped asking questions a while back too. No more looking over my shoulder wondering if today's the day someone mentions the 19-year-old who doesn't need signing off for anything.
"That fear's just gone, quietly, the same way it turned up."
I still use the hooks now even though I probably don't need to, on pull days especially, because they let me actually feel the muscle I'm supposed to be working instead of my grip getting there first.
I'll be more careful long term — the job doesn't exactly get easier on your joints — but I'm not scared of that the same way I was sitting in that van three months ago.
Why Power Hooks Are Only Sold Direct
I don't really write reviews. Genuinely can't remember the last time I left one for anything.
But when something pulls you back from thinking you're about to lose the one thing that keeps you sane, and your job alongside it, you say something. Power Hooks did that for me.
If you're dealing with anything even close to what I went through, I'd tell you to stop reading reviews about heavier lifting and go try them for yourself.
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