The Art of Shrimping

Shrimping (or hip escaping) is one of the basic movements in BJJ.
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You can’t beat anyone with shrimping alone, but this movement is what helps you keep your guard when it’s executed at the right timing. Learning how to shrimp helps you become better at playing the guard.
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Skilled guard players are almost always excellent at shrimping. I could make a reasonable guess about how good someone’s guard is just by looking at how they shrimp.
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I’ve been off the mat for about two weeks now, and I haven’t seen anyone shrimping live recently, but if I am to imagine how a beginner does shrimping, it often looks as if they are quickly alternating between an elongated “I” shape and this “<“ bracket shape by folding their body at their waist and swinging down/raising their arms.
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If your shrimping looks like that, then you need to know what the purpose of shrimping is.
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You probably don’t know what it is, and no one ever explained it to you.
By learning what shrimping is for, your shrimping will start becoming better… and hopefully your overall guard skills.
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OK, so what is shrimping for? It’s a movement that you perform when you need to adjust your position, especially when your opponent puts some pressure on you. This can be a little amount of pressure. Or this can be a huge amount of pressure.
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And when your opponent is putting pressure on you, what you SHOULDN’T do is fight against it by pushing them away, especially when they are bigger/stronger than you. What you can and should do instead is to create frames that stop them from following you so you can move away from them. This “moving away” part is shrimping.
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What you want here is to create some distance between you and your opponent. You could push away your opponent. Or you could move away from them. Either way, you could achieve the same result if done successfully. But the latter requires way less energy, and it’s more efficient.
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When you shrimp as part of warmup exercises, you should imagine creating frames with your arms, receiving your opponent’s pressure with these frames, and moving away from your opponent. And when you move away, you should be able to move your hips easily by placing your top leg’s foot close to your hips.
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There are different ways of doing shrimping, but what’s important to keep in mind (especially if you are a beginner and no one taught you what it’s for) is to imagine your opponent’s pressure and to move away from it.
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In reality, you can shrimp to adjust your angle/position, and it’s not always for moving away/creating some distance between you and your opponent. So you can practice making small movements instead of big, explosive shrimps as well. I think being able to make subtle movements can be more helpful to you in the long run.