Rigging

I hadn't done much rigging before so i followed some tutorials to teach me the basics. To begging with i found it fairly easy. However i then went to attaching handles and they had an effect but not to degree they should. I tried this many times but was having the same response every time. So for the time being i got around the problem but just simply rotating the joints individually. Which was very time consuming and took a lot longer to get the result that i wanted. Below is an image of my rig.