As a veteran of the UFC and a newcomer to the bare-knuckle boxing scene, Paige Van Zant is certainly not someone you’d want to mess with and a soldier did just that when he decided to see if she really could choke him out. The video was uploaded to the official Instagram account of Fighting Lab and shows one of the world’s most recognizable female MMA fighters being allowed to secure a rear-naked choke against a soldier who refuses to tap and instead, simply allows himself to be put to sleep.
As anyone with any grappling experience knows, the rear-naked choke is not something you can simply tough out. In fact, you don’t really want to hang out in any choke or too long or there’s a very real risk of slipping into unconsciousness before you know it. That’s pretty much exactly what this soldier found out when he let Paige Van Zant lock the rear-naked choke in on him and voluntarily held out for as long as he could.
This would happen with pretty much anyone who knows how to apply the choke correctly of course, but when you’re talking about a UFC veteran with an 8-5 professional MMA record, losing consciousness is essentially a certainty. As for Van Zant, it hasn’t been long since she lost her second bare-knuckle boxing match against Rachael Ostovich and now that she stands at 0-2 in the brutal sport, her future in any combat sport seems pretty uncertain.
