Been work on my animation implementation and im confusd about something. the right arm has a counter clockwise rotation on Z of 56 degrees which should bring it inwards and the left arm has a -66 degree rotation (clockwise) on the z which should also bring it inwards but they both go upwards?

Wondering if anyone has had anything similar and could shed some light on what might cause this.

“Counter clockwise on Z” is ambiguous. Should it be counter-clockwise when looking in the negative Z direction or the positive Z direction? Is your coordinate system right-handed or left-handed?

Regardless, if you're consistently getting rotations in the wrong direction, then the solution is to reverse your signs somewhere in the code, and trial-and-error will probably be an easier approach for finding that spot than trying to reason it out. If only some of your rotations are the wrong direction, then you've got a real problem.