Having solid references for your characters is an essential process that every experienced animator advises.

Animation breakdown is a process that has been followed by animators since the beginning of animation altogether, named the " 12 rules of animation ", following certain rules and questioning your own poses is essential in order to improve your animation.

The process is shown below illustrating some of my workflow, I start off with the first and last main poses, add the in-betweens and then finally spline everything, and then set a Euler filter in case I messed up any rotations!