walk work flow(upper torso)

Ok so the hips are done. The feet are done. Now I need to work the spine.
All my timing is figured out. So what I like to do here is to reuse my existing animation, and just pull things around in the graph editor to pose the character. First though I go to the head, I know there is two steps, so the head should rotated up and down subtley when the weight comes down. So I set an extreme key on 1 and 17 and another on 9. I copy paste it so the next goes to frame 33 and I spline it, and copy paste it again so I have 77 frames of animation. The weight comes down on the root on frame 3, so I need my head to start rotating down from frame 3, So I just drag the one extreme to frame 3 and that is done. I can now use this animation for some nice subtle spine movements on the spine. I start on the first fk spine and copy the animation to frame 1, and scale it way down so the values of each extreme are almost the same. I copy that onto each fk spine control. The back looks pretty wierd right now. I go to frame 1 with the graph editor open, I grab the curves and just translate them to where the lower back is on my reference image, and do that with the second and third back controls till I have the pose I was using. From here I can offset each control to follow one frame after the other so I have a nice loose spine but without to much movement so the pose still reads.
Now I need to work in the chest rotations. I know the timing for that will be the same as my hip rotations, its just the chest rotates the opposite direction. Ok easy enough. I can do the same trick with the chest animation. I copy it onto the chest control. I copy paste that animation, and drag it back so my extreme on 17 is my extreme on 1. I can now scale that animation up so its bigger and the pose reflects what I want. To further give myself some nice contraposto, I copy the hips animation onto the fk 1 control, offset it by just 1 frame and scale it down. Again on fk 2 and offset a few more frames, and scale that down as well. Now my whole spine is working nicely, and I really only animated my head and my hips.