I totally recommend that when you rig that you use vertex groups. It feels like a nightmare to name everything, but weight painting is a lot more effective than trying to simply toggle head and take controls, only to find that you easily end up with transformation that leaves a magazine rack in a character's leg. It is a rocking feature and a lot more straightforward than you might think. For the sake of keeping this short-ish, you have to name the bone and the corresponding vertex group exactly the same thing for this to work. If you add Armature as a modifier and tick vertex groups + all the names correspond (case sensitive), Blender will automatically link the groups and the bones. Following this is where weight painting comes in.
Select the mesh that has the armature active on it (through the modifier). Go into weight painting mode (same place where you can find the Particle mode for brushing hair; where it says Object Mode). Now, you select the bone, who's distortion of the shape you wish to edit, and the rest works like the painting features Blender has.
Two Big notes
 - If you set the weight low and you paint over a high area, it will bring it down and vice-versa. It's like painting black over a white area; it will become black.
 - The resolution of your original object is extremely important. Weight painting's detail is determined by the amount of vertices available.

Weight painting of the above's middle post and fabric:
Red means a weight of 1 (total effect) and the dark blue means 0 (no effect). As you can tell, this is a low-poly object, lol.

Back on point though, here is the above's test animation. Enjoy!!

Thank YOU!!!!!!!!!!