There is something almost radical about this video, and it has nothing to do with the temperature. Minus 50 degrees Celsius — temperatures comparable to the surface of Mars — and a man climbs out of bed, walks to a hole in the ice, and gets in. Not because he is proving something. Because this is simply what he does. Has done, for fifty years.
The core claim here is deceptively simple: consistent, lifelong cold exposure builds resilience that compounds. Nikolai wasn't born strong. He was a sick child, prone to colds, physically weak. What changed him was not a supplement stack or a biohacking protocol. It was snow. Rubbed on his body by a teacher who told him to toughen up.
Across 700-plus articles in our knowledge base, the pattern Nikolai embodies shows up again and again. The 30-day cold plunge challenge we've covered, the seven-day January cold exposure series — they all circle the same truth: early discomfort gives way to adaptation, and adaptation gives way to something that starts to feel like ease. The body learns. It remembers. The nervous system recalibrates.
What's harder to measure — but increasingly supported by research — is what Nikolai extends to his students. He treats cold as a gateway to mental and emotional resilience, helping people address addiction and depression through what he calls psychological and spiritual methods. This aligns with what we know about norepinephrine release during cold immersion. It isn't just mood elevation. It's a reset of the body's baseline stress response. Cold doesn't just make you tougher in the water. It changes how you move through the rest of your day.
One thing virtually everyone in the cold exposure literature agrees on: how you enter the water matters enormously. Nikolai is emphatic about this — slow entry, calm breathing, no rushing. The research on cold water shock is unambiguous. Gasp reflex, hyperventilation, cardiac stress — these are real risks that calm, controlled breathing directly mitigates. This is not folklore. This is physiology.
The post-immersion exercise protocol his students follow is also well-supported. Moving your muscles after exiting cold water accelerates thermogenesis. It's the same mechanism that makes shivering effective — skeletal muscle contraction generating heat — but voluntary and more efficient.
Begin at the end of summer. Not because winter cold is too harsh to start with — though it may be — but because gradual acclimatization is how lasting adaptation is built. Your nervous system needs time to learn that this is safe. Give it that time. Start with cool showers. Then cold showers. Then, when your body stops panicking at the first contact, consider the plunge.
Nikolai wears a walrus hat. It's playful, even absurd. But in Russia, practitioners call themselves "walruses" — and that shared identity is not incidental. Every piece of research on sustainable health behavior points to community as a multiplier. Nikolai doesn't just practice cold immersion. He teaches it, names it, builds culture around it. That's what turns a personal ritual into a fifty-year practice. The cold is the door. The community is what keeps it open.