Lift and Push

For the lift I parented the hands to the object, doing this allowed me to animate the body and the ball together. I found this a quite difficult at first and struggled to get the character to lift to ball up straight but I think it works well to add a sense of weight to the ball.

For the push I used inverse kinematics (IK) and forward kinematics (FK). 

IK and FK provide a hierarchy of structure to movements, for example in this I used IK to position the arms, IK starts at at the bottom of the structure for this the hands, so when I moved the hand it would also reposition the rest of the arm. this was fine to position the arms against the wall but animating with IK can make action appear more robotic as IK is linear. Whereas FK takes more time to position as it works downward in this instance starting with the shoulder and then elbow etc. FK  moves in curves which is much better for animating because it looks more natural. After positioning the first and last pose in IK I switched to FK to animate the character pushing against the wall and lined it up with the FK key frame.

I think this works well, apart from the slight pull back before the character leans in, it doesn't quite fit in.