Stand up, crush, superstar! Why sleep at 3am when you can blow your head into a bowl of ice-cold Saratoga bottled water?
That message was conveyed in a video posted last week by X account @tipsformenx. This showed a man with an upper body who had his biceps (which actually sticks out everything) instantly and instantly repeated. It is then shared, shared, shared, shared. As of Monday, X alone has over 700 million views.
This guy often posts videos of his daily life at Ashton Hall, a Florida-based fitness trainer. It's pretty 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 the Saratoga splash.
These videos invite extensive ock and parodies from sports teams and politicians. On Monday, Sen. Ed Markey's X-account, a Democrat in Massachusetts, posted a screenshot of Hall, likening his head into the cold water and compared it to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegses, who fired fire on a commercial messaging app to discuss war plans on a commercial messaging app in a group chat with journalists.
Hall, who used to run football at a former college, has a huge audience. Tiktok has 4.8 million followers. He has almost doubled on Instagram and has another 2.96 million subscribers on YouTube.
Videos like Hall's posts have become increasingly popular and popular in recent years. They are short, easy to digest, and represent an ideal version of how men should live.
Some young men are aware. Husam Hasan, a 23-year-old fitness influencer based in Calgary, Alberta, posted the video a few weeks before Hall was widely seen as a parody of the day in the life of a so-called gym fullest. It included flights that were timestamped a minute before the workout, and a homage to Hall's previous post. Hasan's video counts up to 1.5 million likes, but he considers himself a fan of Hall.
“It works,” Hasan said in an interview. “I soaked my face in cold water. “I understand why everyone is doing it now.”
He added, “It awakens you and is ready to tackle the day in a positive way.”
It's difficult to pick just one highlight from last week's video. There's a 3:54am Swig at Saratoga Spring Water. Push ups at 4:04 followed by another Saratoga Swigg. Some meditations. 5:47 head dunk in a bowl of Saratoga water. Treadmill sprint. Dive into the rooftop swimming pool. (Ignore the sign behind you saying “No diving.” Also, he will take off on a dive at 7:36 and land in the pool at 7:40.) Scrape the banana peel on his face (?). Another ice dunk. And the day really starts with Mr Hall, and it starts with a call saying the line that went into the cultural lexicon.
Hasan said that the ock laughs from others came from being “clearly” unrealistic from everyday life.
“Everyone said, 'OK, there's no way you can do that much or movie,” Hasan said.
Hall did not respond to requests for an interview. A spokesman for Saratoga's parent company, Primo Brand, said Hall was not a paid spokesman and never received compensation from the Primo brand for his posts.
“As a marketer, when your brand became part of someone's life and their story, you did something,” Kheri Tillman, chief marketing officer for Primo brands, said in a statement.
The company declined to comment on the impact of Hall's video on its business.
Nevertheless, Hall's content has been attracting attention. Joseph Phillips, a 26-year-old Memphis content creator named @JoeFromyOutube, posted a parody of Hall of his own. The video has nearly 11 million views.
Phillips said he would never underestimate Hall. He just wanted to show his own taste of blowing his face into cold water. In fact, he said he was “shocked” by Hall's morning routine, and that his appeal was ambitious.
“People want to live better,” Phillips said. “There are a lot of people who want to be healthy, and they see him taking care of his body every day, and they see how wealthy he is.”
Hall's video is a compelling case study, especially in the context of a broader discussion of masculinity after the 2024 election. The column for the British media publication Unherd is called Hall's routine. In the cut, the routine urged the writer to ask if the man was okay.
McCanachock, a communications professor at Syracuse University who studies social media, said there is a “dark side” to some of the messages influencers like Hall gave. In the video, it appears that the woman is offering it in some way only to Mr. Hall, whether it's his breakfast or a towel. She said the video overlaps with the message “from a site of more toxic masculinity” that preaches “this type of appearance and this type of discipline is somehow inherent to being a real man that is especially unattainable for most men.”
In the meantime, Hall posted a new morning routine on Monday. It contains similar moments, which shows him scrolling through his own memes and parody.
“You made the first 10,000,” Hall says in the video. “Congratulations. I have to do at least 20.”
