COCONUT CREEK, Fla. – Dustin Poirier is willing to jump the guillotine on anyone. Literally.

Although the former interim UFC lightweight champion has never finished a professional fight with the submission technique, Poirier has taken the moniker of jumping the guillotine and made it his own – both in and out of the octagon.

So when MMA Junkie recently visited American Top Team, I had to ask Poirier, whom I have known and covered closely for more than a decade of his UFC run and fully trust, if he would be willing to show me his signature technique and offer a step-by-step breakdown of how it's done.

I managed to get all I bargained for and then some.

Not only was Poirier gleefully willing to do it, he also warned of the potential consequences if I didn't tap fast enough.

It all happened very quickly. He put me in a one-arm guillotine choke and explained to the camera where the circulation would cut off once he fully applied it. Once he jumped into it and leaned back into the squeeze, it only took about four seconds for me to go out. I think I was about to tap? But it's hard to remember. All I felt was my vision closing in, then the feeling of a jolt, which turned out to be Mateusz Gamrot holding up my legs and shaking the blood circulation back into my brain as I regained consciousness.

That was wild.

The feeling of that brief sensation from the choke taking effect to returning back to normalcy gets more distant the further removed from the experience it gets. There's no better way to explain the turmoil of those immediate moments afterward than what I said in the video when it was at its most raw.

The biggest takeaway from the aftermath, and watching it back, was the sense of embarrassment viewing the footage. From the first-hand accounts of those who witnessed it, the process my body went through upon going limp was standard. But it's tough to watch yourself in that state where your hard drive was wiped clean and those few seconds of blacking out are simply erased from your memory bank.

This was a nothing moment all done in good fun ultimately, but the fighters who experience losing consciousness by a submission or a knockout, then being forced to watch it back over and over on replay in some instances, I now know how that leaves a truly unsettling feeling in your gut.

I have never had a lack of appreciation for the MMA athletes and the courage it takes to step into that cage entirely exposed and with no guarantee of the outcome. It certainly wasn't Poirier's intention to serve a reminder of those realities, but it's what happened.

Major thanks to him for being willing to participate, and of course, for letting go when he did.

Check out the video above to see how it all went down and Poirier's demonstration of the jumping guillotine choke.

This article originally appeared on MMA Junkie: UFC star Dustin Poirier choked me unconscious. Here's my experience.

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