Andy Richter Details the ‘Borderline Abuse I Was Doing to Myself’ on ‘DWTS’ (Exclusive)

Andy Richter’s time on Dancing with the Stars had a major impact on his life — and his body.

After making it to Week 9 of the popular competition series, the 59-year-old comedian sat down with PEOPLE to reflect on how the experience changed him. Less than two weeks after his elimination, Richter says he is still recovering physically.

“Certainly my body is enjoying not dancing, just because I was really getting to the point where I was always having to ice my knees every hour,” he reveals. “We’d dance a while and then I’d have to ice my knee, and there was a lot of pain and getting injections just to be able to keep going. So I’m healing. It’s not even just that I’m sort of resting, I feel like my legs are healing now. It wasn’t just exercise, it was borderline abuse that I was doing to myself.”

“As much as I do feel like my body’s healing, I do kind of miss the physicality of it,” he adds. “Going to the gym and doing the elliptical is not the same thing as rehearsing a new dance with Emma. It’s just not.”

Richter, praising his friendship with his partner Emma Slater, went on to share that it “has been an adjustment” to go from spending every day together to having to catch up on text. 

“There is a little bit of rehearsal withdrawal,” he admits. “I watched the [latest] show and it felt a little bit like seeing a video of your friends at a party that you weren’t invited to.”

When he was first approached to join the show in April 2025, Richter says he was reluctant to accept the offer. For years he had been working out with a trainer and has been open about his weight struggles in the past, but he still “did not have a healthy attitude about exercise or about my own body or about my own fitness.”

“My initial reaction was, it was to say no,” he recalls. “And then two seconds later, I was like, ‘I have to do this.’ I mean, it’s a good job. It’s well paying and it’s good exposure, but that honestly was secondary to me feeling like, no, this will be really good for me to have to do this fairly scary, daunting, physical thing. And I knew that that would be good for me because I was very much aware of the fact that I kind of was in a bit of a rut just in terms of my physicalness, my physicality, my body.”

At the beginning, it was “very difficult” for the Three Questions podcast host, who notes “it was not a natural process” to learn the dances. Much to his surprise, however, he quickly fell in love with the sport.

“I really started to feel a sense of accomplishment in learning to do it,” Richter shares. “And [Slater] made me feel so good about doing it, and she made it so much fun.”

“I really started to enjoy it and started to feel transformed by it and started to like the exercise,” he continues. “There was just a lightness to me, I mean in attitude. I was able to sort of feel like, yeah, I’m going to do this. And it definitely was hard. It’s long hours. It’s four hours a day, seven days a week, minimum. I have bad knees and a bad hip, and so there’s just plain old pain involved for me in doing it. But I really got into it and I really committed myself to it.”

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Looking back to himself just a few months ago, Richter feels like “a different person” both physically and mentally. 

“There’s a lot of stuff that I didn’t think I could do anymore,” he confesses. “It’s made what I think is physically possible, it’s expanded that completely. And honestly, it’s kind of made me younger. I’m younger now than when I started doing this.”

“I’ve seen it with people in my life that as they get older, they are these open people that are willing to try new things and do new things, and as they get older, that shuts down and they get more scared and they get more fearful and they stick to the tiny little island of what they know and what they feel comfortable with,” he explains. “I have for years seen that and gone, oh man, I don’t want to do that. I think I was on my way there without really even admitting it to myself, and this ballroom dance competition has changed that for me.”