Hope everyone had a good break 
Doing a quick breakdown on how I put this together .
To keep things simple I used a set driven key to animate the cycle to be driven by an attribute. The attribute becomes the timeline - this way I can have the cycle in my rig and not having to worry about many animation clips .
Making the root or global ctlr a marker that has no collisions helps maintain the body surging motion
That way even when the body is not pinned and its position is based on the dynamics it will preserve this surging motion
Now that I have the root as a marker this allows me to pin the roots rotation this will preserve the cycle without having to pin any thing that would compromise the cycle . Self locomotion works really well with this as the root marker is keeping the rest upright.
We can go further now and attach constrain this root ctrl to a simple joint chain shown by the cubes .
More to come! this one was fun!
