Ben Mowen uses machine on neck injury three times a week to be fit for matches Mowen has battled the neck injury since June. WALLABIES skipper Ben Mowen has spent most of the last seven months hooked up to a machine that has saved his Test career as he battles a neck injury that's withered away his left arm. Ahead of Australia's final Test of 2013 this weekend against Wales, Mowen has revealed the painful injury and rehabilitation process that has plagued him since June. Two weeks before his Test debut against the British and Irish Lions, Mowen suffered the bulging disk injury during training and despite doctors advising him to stand down or have surgery, the 28-year-old has played through. The injury is to the fifth disk in the cervical vertebrae - "the one that wastes your arm away," Mowen says, revealing his left bicep, now half the size of his right. "There were a couple of options, one of them was not playing, the other was surgery, it was to the point where I had to tell them it was my decision to get out on the field," Mowen said. I'm very wary that if you get into this position you're just going to open the door for some other bloke to walk through and that's it, it's gone. I've waited a long time to get here, and if I can avoid it I won't be opening that door. At the start of the rehabilitation process, Mowen had to strap into a traction machine that stretches his neck from his body for 30 minutes every day. It is now down to three times a week, with the traction machine squeezed into his hotel rooms on tour. Mowen's persistence paid off with a stunning rise to the Wallabies' captaincy after just a handful of games. "The last three or four weeks it's come back to being good again, my power is not back fully but the pain has gone," Mowen said. I think it has corresponded with my spike in form, because as much as you try to play the best you can, with type of niggle it is a bit inhibiting. The position we're in, in the forwards, everything revolves around putting pressure through your neck. But the injury got much worse immediately after the Lions series because Mowen embarked on a gruelling travel schedule with the Brumbies, who made the Super Rugby final after winning games in Perth, Canberra and Pretoria before facing the Chiefs away in successive weeks. "I noticed in that window there my bench-press halved, and I just couldn't get any power through my left shoulder," he said. I just had a bit of deterioration there. The tough thing with these neck injuries is that the worst thing you can do for them is just sit, and we had to go from the Lions to Perth, back to Canberra, to Pretoria, went to Hamilton. So that's what made it worse, planes are the worst thing for it where you just sit and you're cramped. Mowen plans to finish a monumental year on a high with victory in Cardiff, with the Wallabies having beaten Wales in their previous eight encounters. "It's important to hold that over a team going into a World Cup, particularly when we're going to have to win those two big games against England and Wales to get out of our pool in good shape," Mowen said. That's a really good way to have it, rather than coming in and they've won one of the last two or won the last encounter. You want that mental edge over a side.