We’ve always known that Dancing With The Stars is no walk in the park for its celebrity contestants but now one contestant has revealed just how hard they have to work behind the scenes.
Speaking to Yahoo! Lifestyle, comedian Felicity Ward said she was rehearsing for 35 hours a week in the lead up to the show.
“It was so hard, I couldn’t believe it,” she told the publication. “I had this delusional fantasy that I would like to rehearse for a few hours a day and just be incredible immediately, and I’d be just relaxing in between, but I was wrong. It was insane.”
“I would walk up a set of stairs and think, ‘That’s probably enough to get me through’. What a rude shock I got,” she continues. “My hips hurt nearly every day, I got athlete’s foot for the first time in my life, I was in high heels seven hours a day. It was like boot camp but for balancing.”
Despite the gruelling schedule, Felicity said the show changed her life.
“I’ve had a few really hard years, lots of difficult personal stuff, and I just got used to thinking things can’t be fun or good if they’re hard,” she told the publication. “And even though DWTS was so physically, mentally, and emotionally challenging, it gave me such an amazing sense of what I was capable of. Then by the time I got to perform, it was such a thrill and a relief.”
The comedian also told TV WEEK that the show changed her body.
“I think I dropped two dress sizes over the show, but because I put muscle on I was the same weight,” she said. “I was ripped! I’ve never been so muscly in my life.”
Felicity is not the first contestant to talk about the intense rehearsal schedule. Earlier in the year, Home and Away’s Kyle Shilling told Chattr it was “gruelling”.
“We had a five-week rehearsal period. I had maybe two days off throughout those five weeks. And each day we were rehearsing for about six hours a day,” he told the publication.
Kyle said that on top of learning the dances with their dance partner, contestants have to make sure they’re in top physical form for the show.
“You want to make sure that your body’s good and free of injuries,” he explained. “So I had a little bit of time to prep myself mentally and physically before the show, which was great. I was going to the gym, I was trying to implement a lot more stretches into my daily routine, and then even just doing a little bit of research on what styles you’re doing to see how the body works.”
Speaking to The Australian Women’s Weekly earlier this month, 60-year-old Rebecca Gibney said she was not at all prepared for the intense rehearsal schedule.
In the lead up to the show, the Packed to the Rafters star enjoyed a trip to the UK where she “ate and drank everything” before being struck down by the flu when she returned to New Zealand. By the time she arrived in Sydney to start rehearsals in January, she was “not in a good way”.
She recalled telling her dance partner Ian Waite, who won the competition last year with Lisa McCune, to go a bit easier on her.
“He was so wonderful, but by the end of the second day, I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is really going to be hard, ’ and it didn’t get any easier. It didn’t get easier at all,” she told the publication.
“I’ve got fairly natural musical ability, but when it comes to ballroom dancing, forget it! That goes out the window. It’s irrelevant. It’s more important for you to be fit.”
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