How to create a simple animation by changing bone transforms in Mecanim

Hello folks,

I'm trying to create a simple kick animation using the Ethan character in the unity standard assets package. As you can see in the images below, I've primed the character's skeleton/bone transforms into a 'ready-to-kick' position. And this 'ready-to-kick' position is going to be the start and end frames of the animation clip.

But when i'm about to set the key frames for the various times throughout the clip cycle - by scrubbing the 'timer' to the desired seconds mark, the player mesh goes into this awkward doggy paddle pose. Which makes it difficult to set the key frame value (either by recording the change to the bone transforms, or manually entering the values). Because i can't see how the pose changes. How can i stop the character mesh from defaulting to this 'bunched up' pose?

Thank you for your time.

Here's the character position before and after scrubbing:

Before Scrubbing After Scrubbing