animation: worked backwards, better progress (?)

My recent experience might possibly be relevant to someone.

I wanted to animate a human, shoveling. I obtained a nice reference video. I tried to animate human motions based on the video. I was unsuccessful.

An alternate approach was quite successful.

• Animate shovel from the reference video (pretty easy).
• Attach human feet:IK to the ground.
• Attach human hands:IK to the shovel, appropriate locations.
• Extend hands:IK constraint through the whole spine. (Clavicle bones needed to be removed.) This was a major key.
• Move armature to comfortable position.

Almost instantly I got a quite believable animation. A little tweaking made even more improvement.

So I guess I need to expand my thinking box?