Shrimping
Last night was another night of teaching the intermediate class. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary (warmup then poomsae), except I introduced the class to shrimping. MarksTraining had a good post on this very subject today. In short, shrimping is a way to move yourself into a better position when you are on the ground. The Tae Kwon Do-ists in the class have hardly spent any time on the ground, and the movement was completely alien to most of them. Even some of the students who had done it before looked pretty lost.
One thing that is interesting with the shrimp movement is that there are two variations that I’m aware of; two leg pushing and “killing” a leg. The videos in the post at MarksTraining show the two-leg push variation; both hands and feet start near the same place, and you push your butt away with all four limbs. The other way is to straighten the bottom leg and to not use it in the motion. The idea is that that leg is trapped (such as in half guard) and there isn’t enough space to bend the knee. Shrimping with a dead leg allows the leg to pull out from a pretty small opening.
In BJJ, we don’t really spend time shrimping, except periodically as part of the warmup. I’m not even sure I remember our BJJ instructor really explaining the shrimp (aka hip excape) movement in enough detail to know which way he prefers when we’re going up and down the floor. I prefer the two-footed approach shown in the videos. But, like any sort of movement exercise, the application is going to be dependent on the situation you’re in. And in the middle of grappling, you just do whatever works.
Back to the intermediate class, I’m a demonstrating type of instructor, and I obviously couldn’t do much demonstrating with one arm in a sling. Still, I was a bit disappointed that I wasn’t able to convey the idea a little better. Not that we spent more than about 4-5 minutes on the subject. After shrimping, I had them do a crab walk. One of the instructors dubbed shrimp + crab as “the crustaceon”. Heh.