Sprite Animation Controller Based Physics

I'm building an action platformer using sprites, and I have an animation controller which is pulling duty as a state machine. Some of my animations have non-uniform movement patterns such as stepping into sword attacks. Is there a way I can tie the rigidbody physics to the animation given that this is sprite based and not skeletal?

Right now I'm dreading having to read values from the animation controller into code, which isn't exactly best practice but I'm not quite sure how to achieve this.