Question on how to go about splitting my character into different meshes and animating them

I am a beginner to UE4 and modeling in general. I created a simple low poly character and was able to successfuly create and use basic walking and idle animations inside UE4. Now, I am wondering how I should go about creating different animations for each different item/weapon/action that my character does. Especially turning animations. I checked out the free AnimationStartPack on the marketplace and it seems to have seperate full body animations for each different weapon, which honestly seems kind of inefficient. Is this standard? I would think that the upper body/lower body meshes would be seperate and that instead of recreating full body animations, you can somehow mount the upper body (which would have all the seperate animations for holding/using items/weapons) onto the lower body (which would have walking/running/turning animations) in the engine. Or maybe just the arms onto the rest of the body. Is this right? Or not? If it is, how should I go about it? If this is incorrect, I suppose I should create full body animations for each different item/weapon? Or is there some other, better way? Thanks. Sorry if I am not making a lot of sense.

Here is the link to my character:

Ignore the Walk_Blocking animation

Big thanks to whoever helps me!

It seems that the “Layered blend per bone” node in my characters AnimGraph is exactly what I am looking for. I can specify what bones of one animation I want to merge with another. So I can take the arm bones of an animation in which my character is holding an object and merge it with a simple walking animation, instead of creating a seperate whole walking animation with my character holding the object.