"I thought it was going to be the easiest thing ever. I got on it and I was like — this is the hardest thing I've ever done. Because I was activating all the muscles around my ankle. For probably the first time in a long time."

Brian Llamas ran competitively for over two decades. He was good — good enough to race professionally, good enough to know what his body was supposed to feel like. And for almost ten of those years, his Achilles never really let him forget that something was wrong.

The tight calves. The chronic inflammation. The way it would flare up — not dramatically, just persistently. He had access to resources most athletes don't: physios, treatment, support staff. And still, it followed him. The thing nobody told him was that running more wasn't making his foot stronger. It was just loading a structure he'd never actually trained.

The shift came when he hit a wall. The injuries were accumulating, the excitement was gone, the sport felt like it was leaving him behind. His wife was doing triathlons. He thought it looked like the coolest thing — until he realised how much training it actually required. But he committed to it, and something clicked. Within his first year, he got his pro licence. And the Achilles, for the first time in a decade, started to settle down.

The biggest factor was always running on the track — around circles, constantly, at high intensity. The repetitive one-direction load just accumulates over time. And then the evolution of shoes didn't help — going from very flat, minimal shoes to spikes and back again, all of it flaring up the Achilles area.

But the root cause was simpler than any of that. I didn't know the importance of strengthening the foot as a runner. That caused really tight calf muscles. Which then caused chronic Achilles issues for almost a decade. The foot was never getting trained — just loaded, over and over, in the same direction, on the same surface.

As athletes, we always think we're doing everything right. Working really hard. But the truth is, running does not inherently make your foot and ankle strong. You can run 100 miles a week and still have pretty weak feet. I found that out the hard way.

I thought it was going to be the easiest thing ever. I'd been training for years. I was fit. I got on it and I was just like — this is the hardest thing I've ever done. It was brutal. Because I was activating all the foot muscles. And then also my Achilles.

I noticed right away how much my foot was working. The activation — what I call the burning sensation — just because everything was firing up that hadn't been firing. I remember going straight to Caitlin and telling her that was extremely hard. And she made fun of me.

But that moment told me something important. I realised I wasn't actually activating the muscles around my ankle. And this tool showed me that I had pretty weak feet — after two decades of professional running. The foam pad or just the floor you're not getting anywhere near the full effect of what you need to be doing. The two-piece design of the AxisBoard means you can activate the whole foot — forefoot and rearfoot independently. That's something I'd never had access to before.

The exercise I do most is the 3D motion drill. One foot on the AxisBoard, the other foot touches the front, then the side, then the back, and repeat. That really fires up the muscles around the ankle and works on stability in all three planes. Once I started doing that consistently, and doing the calf and Achilles work alongside it — the injuries started to reduce. I haven't had a stress fracture since.

It's become non-negotiable the night before any hard session. I scrape along the Achilles for about two to five minutes — just to get a little blood flow in there, get it reddish. Then I move up the calf and do the same thing, another two to five minutes. That's it. Ten minutes total. But if I skip it, I feel it the next morning. Stiff. Not able to use my biomechanics the way I'm supposed to. The run just doesn't feel right.

When I was a professional runner, I had access to physios, treatment staff — resources most athletes don't get. And then those went away. I had to figure out how to replicate that at home, on the road, at training camps. The Echo is what replaced all of it. It packs into a carry case. I bring it to every race. I can just do it on the go without having to find a medical professional or book an appointment. It does what a clinic visit does — for the Achilles, for the calf, for the soleus — and I can do it the night before anything that matters.

The difference now versus ten years ago is that I understand what I'm actually treating. Tight calves restrict the Achilles. The Achilles gets loaded and doesn't recover. Scraping releases that fascia buildup, brings blood flow into tissue that running tends to compress rather than open up. Combine that with the AxisBoard work — the actual strengthening — and you're addressing the problem from both sides. That's what took me a decade to figure out.