What should you do when opponent opens with excessive pawn moves? As a beginner I'm not spending much time studying openings (there are so many!) but trying to work on opening principles.

One principle I've read is not to move too many pawns in your opening moves.

So, when an opponent opens with a long sequence of pawn moves, I feel like there should be some weakness that I should be exploiting.  Instead I ended up feeling extremely cramped.  What should you be thinking about if your opponent is only moving pawns?

Example:

[White "Me"]
[FEN ""]

1. d4 f5 2. Nf3 e6 3. Bf4 d6 4. e3 h6 5. Bc4 g5 6. Bg3 c6 7. Nc3 a5
The thing is, in this example you opponent didn't play all that badly. h6 and g5 looks too risky to me, but blunting your bishop (with d6) and gaining space on the queenside makes some sense. Right now b5 is a threat and you might want to prevent it by playing a4. This would be the positional treatment of the position.

There are two problems with pushing too many pawns in the opening:

The creation of weaknesses: In your example the diagonal h5-e8 is weakened and you should always consider possibilities of bringing a queen to h5.

Neglect of development: But to punish lack of development you have to open the position. This can be done by pawn levers or by piece sacrifices. Or possibly by a combination of both. Now, if you had a pawn on c4 you could play 8.d5 and answer 8…e5 with 9.Nxe5 de 10.Qh5+ and 11.Bxe5.
Unfortunately you don't have a pawn on c4 and you only promising pawn lever e4 would lose the Bg3. So you have to go more slowly. Possibly Nd2,f3,e4 is a plan. Maybe after a4.

So, to sum up:


If you develop your bishops early, your opponent might get some pawn play against them. (In your example, against both!)
You can stop expansion with your own pawns (a4 or h4) and thereby also protect your pieces from a pawnstorm.
If your lead in development gets big, search for a way to open the position. Make sure you have a pawn lever (i.e. put enough pawns in the center), consider piece sacrifices.