COMPLETE YOUR MORNINGS BY DUNKING YOUR FACE INTO COLD WATER

Rise and grind, superstars! Why are you sleeping at 3am when you could be dunking your head into a bowl of ice-cold Saratoga bottled water?

- SOPAN DEB

That message is conveyed in a video, posted by the X account @tipsformenx last week, that showed a shirtless man with protruding biceps (actually, protruding everything) recapping in minute detail his morning routine. It has since been shared, and shared, and shared. As of last week, it is up to more than 700 million views on X alone.

The man is Ashton Hall, a Florida-based fitness trainer who often posts videos of his daily routine. That is fairly common among lifestyle influencers. But since January, Hall's routine has included dunking his head into a bowl of Saratoga Spring Water - let's call it a Saratoga Splash.

These videos have invited widespread mockery and parodies, including from sports teams and politicians. The X account of Senator Ed Markey posted a screenshot of Hall plunging his head into cold water and likened him to Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, who came under fire for discussing war plans on a commercial messaging app in a group chat that included a journalist.

Hall, a former college football running back, has a large audience. On TikTok, he has 4.8 million followers. He has almost double that on Instagram and another 2.96 million subscribers on YouTube.