The Everlast Powerbow is a piece of kit designed to help with upper body fitness. In essence it is for getting big arms and defining pectoral (Chest) muscles.

Part of what originally attracted to me was the fact my grandfather used to have one of the old bullworker pieces of fitness equipment many years ago and it seemed like a solid workout, where you pushed both ends of the bullworker towards each other and built chest muscles through the tension.

The powerbow has this facility and if working on this alone, it isn't bad, you push inwards and the tension created really works your arms and more especially your chest muscles as the tension created causes your muscles to really work hard.

However this alone wouldn't make it worth £19.99, which I paid for it at Amazon. The powerbow also does what it says in the tin and works almost like a bow, it has two fibre cables either side of the main handles and by holding each one of these and pulling outwards, you should work your arms and chest and shoulder muscles extensively as the slow tension really works the muscles hard. The two processes combined can lead to a good workout which is roughly equivalent to a good session on the fly machine in the gym. Unfortunately...............

The kit works well in bullworker mode, however when used as a bow, Everlast haven't put as much care into this as they really should have, the cables are not brilliant and I noticed as I got stronger they did the opposite, eventually one of the cables snapped and I had to take the item back for a refund, unfortunately having looked at Amazon (Which I should have in the first instance now), I can appreciate that this is a design fault and one which I think they should really rectify rather than continuing to sell this item.

As the item snapped my little one was in the room and it made me think that this is actually a little dangerous as well as useless. The item has basic instructions of how to use it on the handles and markers which display how far you have pushed the stick in/pulled it out, to show how you are progressing, alongside the design faults, there is only so far you can go with this until you have pushed it as far as you can.

It looks fine, but when you start to appreciate how poorly made it is, you start to look at in that manner, so I have to say it looks cheap, the fibre glass bow extensions are not good quality and the item takes up little space but doesn't look nice at all. I think this wasn't a good use of £20, I should have either used it towards a better piece of kit like the 'Golds Gym' version, or asked my Grandfather where he got his as its still going strong after 45 years.

Overall, the breakage ruined this for me and I would give it 1 out of 5 as I only got 3 months use out of the item (only using it once a week), so that is 12 uses for £20. Not good quality or value, which is unlike Everlast.