Shrimping is a fundamental movement to your escapes, and having a good escape game is the foundation of your brazilian jiu jitsu development. If you’re confident in your escapes, you’ll develop a better guard and top game as a result. If you invest the time on working on your escapes you’re ironically going to spend less time on bottom. If you don’t work on your bottom game you’re going to spend a lot of time getting squashed!
All these drills are designed to get you used to shrimping out of mount. Shrimping out of side control drills can be found here.
Drill 1: Standing shrimps
One athlete stands at his partner’s hips, slightly pinching his feet to create a bit of pressure (killing space). The guy on the bottom shrimps his hips free and lies on his back. The guy standing takes a step forward to pinch the hips again, and the guy on bottom shrimps free. You can pinch your partner’s hips tighter to make the drill more challenging, or loosen your grip to make the drill easier if your partner is inexperienced.
Drill 2: Kneeling
(sorry about the fuzzy photos!)
Like drill 1, in drill 2 you knee above your partner’s hips. This creates less space for the guy shrimping, and forces them to have better technique. As in drill 1, if you’re the guy on top, you don’t offer any resistance.
(To make this drill work easier, make sure you’re partnered up with someone of the same body type)
Shrimp 3: Pseudo Mount
In this drill, the guy on top takes a very loose mount. They’ll put their arms on the ground, but won’t attempt to contol the head. Also, your weight is on your knees, you shouldn’t be sitting on your opponent.
If your shrimp breaks down, as it does in this video, you need to go back to the earlier drills.
Another video of good shrimping technique
I used to think that shrimping wasn’t a natural movement. But I’ve noted that if you show a 3 year old side control and guard, then put them underneath side control and tell them to get back to guard, they’ll shrimp into the position. So I’m led to believe that you shrimping is a movement that we forget as we get older.