We built the thing we couldn’t find.

I spent more than fifteen years working as a store clerk. Stocking, lifting, serving, restocking — the same floor, eight or nine hours at a stretch, most days of the week. It is not the sort of job anybody writes about. You are just on your feet, and then you go home, and then you do it again.

About five years ago my hip caught up with me. There was no accident and no single moment I can point to. It simply went from something I noticed at the end of a long week to something waiting for me every afternoon, around the same hour, whether the week had been long or not.

I did everything you are supposed to do. Physical therapy. X-rays. Pills. And every appointment finished the same way: move carefully, take these, come back if it gets worse. I am not going to say any of that was bad advice, because it wasn’t. It just wasn’t advice I could actually use. “Move carefully” assumes you have a choice about how you move. On a shop floor, at four in the afternoon, with stock to shift, you don’t.

So I started strapping things to it myself. Sleeves, wraps, a belt from the chemist — anything I could get around the hip and the top of the thigh. Most of it was useless in the same two ways: it rolled down before lunch, or it was too bulky to wear under work trousers without everyone knowing about it.

What worked, when I finally got it right, was proper compression that held its position around the joint and the top of the thigh all day instead of creeping down. The difference didn’t show up in the first ten minutes; it showed up at the end — I was less sore by the time I got home, and bending down to a bottom shelf stopped being the thing I braced for. That is my own experience and not a promise about yours. But it was enough to make me want a proper version of it rather than a chemist’s belt and a lot of guessing.

That is the whole reason Uphold exists. Not to fix anybody, and not to replace the physio — just to get one person through one shift without it being the thing they think about all afternoon.

So that is what the support had to be: something that could survive a working day rather than an hour on the sofa. That meant two straps instead of one, because a single band around the thigh has nothing holding it up. It meant neoprene rather than thin elastic knit, because knit stretches out by lunchtime. It meant one piece that wraps either side, so nobody orders the wrong leg. And it meant flat enough to vanish under scrubs, work trousers or an apron — because most people would rather nobody at work knew.

Written by the founder. We keep his name off the site on purpose — he isn’t a clinician, and a name on a page about hips starts to look like a credential. Anything on this site described as research is the work of the UpHold Research Team.