 So today, I got your back. It's going tibia, okay, hip, hip, hooray, we're finally talking about how to study for freaking anatomy. Let's get into it. All right guys, welcome back to channel. Hopefully you found some of those puns humorous. I promise that's probably the last one, but no promises actually. In case you're new here, my name is Lex from Internal Medicine Physician making videos to help you succeed on your medical journey with less stress. Today I'm going to make a video that's going to add to our series on how to better prepare for classes in medical school including anatomy. So if you're excited, hit that like button, hit that subscribe button, let's get to it. So when you're studying for anatomy, you have to obviously understand that it's a very unique type of class because not only is the information something you have to memorize, but it's also something that often, especially in medical school, you have to apply definitely as a physician. And so how you prepare for anatomy really should account for the uniqueness of the topic itself. And so whenever I teach new medical students in my coaching programs or by books, which you guys can check out down below if you guys are interested, I always break down anatomy into different phases. So the first step is to get an overview of the traditional way of how we learn anatomy. Personally, I think is incorrect. When I was serving as an anatomy TA in my fourth year of medical school, I taught this to all medical students I worked with. Then I teach the same approach to all the students I worked with in my coaching programs and my books, which you guys can check out below. But getting an overview means that instead of exposing yourself to a text that has a bunch of detail and names of muscles and organs and things that you just may not be familiar with, why not focus on engaging overviews created by other people who are going to help you better distinguish. This is more important, this less so. Now how you do this is completely up to you. My favorite is to watch videos on YouTube on whatever topic I'm about to learn the next day in class or in lab and or both. And so just for example, if you're learning about the back and anatomy or you're about to do a dissection of the back, the nice thing to do would be to watch a YouTube video that's like five, 10 minutes long and get exposed to what that person considers to be important regarding the anatomy of the back. And then however you wish to create notes, whether it be in a word doc and one note, ever note and notion or making flashcards, you could simply do that. But again, this first overview is really designed for you to say, okay, these are the things ideally I should know if I watch this video a week from now after I did the lab. And then watching a video is not for you. You can also read a high yield resource or guide and I'll link below a blog post that goes over and reviews a few of the common ones. But now once you have your overview in this example, we're talking about the back, the next thing is to create a mental model. Now compared to your other classes where it's kind of like, do I know this information or not anatomy is very positional as well as very factual. So not only do you need to know, okay, this organ does this or this nerve supplies this muscle, but you also have to know relationships between muscles, between bones, between tendons, etc. And so there is a little bit of art of understanding that process becomes easier if you can use mental models. And so there's really three good ways that I found to create a mental model. The first one is simply doing what it sounds like, which is to create a mental model after you watch an overview and thinking about, okay, if I'm about to go into the dissection for the back muscles, after watching that video, what muscles do I think will be where on the cadaver? So they talked about the latissimus, they talked about the rhomboids, the teres major, minor, subscapularis, it's not somehow still remember this. And you would simply ask, okay, where would I see this structure or this nerve when I do the dissection? That's you creating your initial mental model. Now when you go into lab or you go into lecture, you may say, oh crap, well actually these two muscles I flipped in my head, or this is actually closer to this than I thought, or this is more lateral. This is not exactly how I pictured it, your mental model gets refined. But sometimes we don't appreciate that that is a small correction of that mental model is an important part of learning that we don't often appreciate. Imagine your classmates who don't use this approach, imagine your classmates who haven't watched this video don't use that approach, they just go into lab and say, oh, I know I'm learning the back and whatever, and we're just gonna figure that out. Well, they have nothing to rely on. So whatever they see is what they're expecting. But what they don't learn is effectively from the lab or the lecture compared to you because you already have, like this is what I thought would happen, and this is actually what the body ended up looking like. Now if creating a mental mental model doesn't work, there's plenty of other options. My second favorite is to use pre-made Anki cards. Anki is an amazing tool. I've made a video about how to use Anki like a pro, which I'll link down below as well as put right here because a lot of you guys enjoyed it. But it's amazing for anatomy because surprise, surprise, the human body doesn't really change. And so plenty of people have made pre-made cards from actual cadavers and labeling structures or illustrations. And it'd be nice for you to say, okay, watch the video, kind of know what the back muscles are gonna look like. Let me do a pre-made deck of the back muscles and say, oh, I actually didn't think that that was the Terry's minor, but I guess it is. And again, that is a correction in the form of learning from your initial mental model to now. It is a little bit more refined, a little bit more experienced. And then finally in my third favorite that I would do probably later on as I got closer to test is just drawing rough sketches on a blank piece of paper. Some people would like to be really great artists when it comes to anatomy, but you don't really have to do that. For example, if you are trying to label the muscles of the back, I would simply use a line to represent the muscles and like a little swiggly to represent arteries and veins. And then I would use like a thunderbolt or a zigzag to represent nerve. But roughly what I'm trying to say is like, okay, this muscle is going to be on the lateral sides, your lats are on the lateral sides of your back. But using these lines and figures, I could simply illustrate on a piece of paper the rough orientation and relationships between muscles. I could say the lats are on the outside. Here is the artery that's going to supply it. And then I have some bend muscles right here, right around your spine and some few muscles here. Then you have your traps in the back and here all the arteries going to each and every single one. Having that relationship means that when you go into cadaver lab, you say, okay, like these are how these things should look again, you're creating your mental model. If you draw something, you're like, I know there's something here, but I honestly don't know what it is. That is a form of correction is a form of mental model. And keep in mind, all we've done so far is you've obtained some information by watching a video. And now you've created a mental model of what you think to be true, but we really haven't started learning and you still have done a lot of learning to this part. And number three is probably my favorites that definitely listen up, which is to create a hit list or a checklist of all the topics you need to know. Now many institutions will do this where you have to identify things on cadaver and they may give you a hit list of things that they expect you to know. But in case they don't, one of the great ways you can do this is doing it on a Word doc or Excel sheet or my current personal favorite way of doing it is in the notion. So as an example here, where in my notion dashboard, this is my medical topics folder. And if we open up anatomy, one thing you can do is you can create a folder for anatomy that is going to be an inline table that could be split based off of your different exams or quizzes. And then you can label the different things that you see show up in your lecture topics, things that show up in national discussions for your labs and just put them as the things. So it can be the nerves and muscles and you can label these however you want. So, you know, I can say nerve, I can put muscle under the rhomboid. And the nice thing about this is you're essentially creating a very complex database. It's very simple for you to create, but you can split this based off of the lab that it was a part of, whether it was a lab or something you learned in lecture. And so then when you come back and like, okay, let's review the stuff from lab number two, the back muscles. And then you can say, I'm going to go ahead and filter. And I wanted to just show me stuff from things that are in we're in column one. And so in this example, we selected a few things from lab number two, which represents the back muscles. And so I can see not only all the structures that I should know, but also some of the questions that I asked myself from lecture, and you can use this filter function even further. So if you want to learn something just for your lab, and you want to just memorize the structures, you can add another filter rule and say, well, let's go ahead and just tell me things that are from lab. And so hide all of the questions, but now only show me the structures I need to know. And so now I can keep this as a list of things on my phone, I can print this out and take it to the lab, don't touch your phone during dissection labs, it's disgusting. But if I know where the rhomboids are, I can just check this off and then the latissimus. And you can go down this list. And so if you can find everything on multiple different cadavers, you can be like, well, I'm amazing at lab number two. And then you do the same process for lab number one and three and four, as you get closer. And on the same kind of note, if you were studying for your lecture component, you really didn't need to know the structure itself. You wanted to know essentially what the structure did, what movement it did, or how things are related. Those are kind of questions that you'll see. You could say, well, show me things that are coming from lecture. And so here is a question about the muscles that are part of the rotator cuff. Now you can make a different column where you put the answers here, or you can just put the question itself. And if you don't know it, then it forces you to go back to those slides for that lecture and not only learn that piece of information, but also all the other piece of information surrounding that topic. And again, this is just one way of how you can combine checklists. I like Notion just because it gives you that nice ability to do multiple things at once, but you can make this very simple and just have a word talk of all the things you need to know from each of your lectures and have a checklist and just like literally knock them off. That's what I did when medical school before Notion came out and it worked just fine. Now the next step is to test your knowledge and also apply the functions of things. So the first step again is to create mental models to one understand relationship-wise where everything is. Because if you can do that, you can say, okay, like these are the muscles and these are the nerves that are related, but then also start attributing the functions to things. So if you know a specific vessel and where it is in the body, the next question is, okay, where does the vessel go to? Or what muscles and organs does it go to? If there's a nerve, what organs does it innervate? Those are questions you start to ask. If it's a muscle, what movement does it do? If it's a joint, kind of what directions and different movements can you do at that joint? There's a lot of different questions you can ask. The first step of identifying function is to identify what you're identifying the function of. That makes sense. You can't really identify the function of the latissimus if you don't know what the latissimus is or where it is. And so it's very easy to know, for example, what the bicep does, subtle flex, and to be able to know where it connects and be able to make that relationship to then say, okay, how does it work? What movements does it make? What innervates this muscle? And you start to ask questions of combining things together. And again, how you do the testing part is really up to you. You can use those pre-made Anki cars to say, okay, cool, this muscle that is showing me on this cadaver is latissimus. The latissimus does these four functions. And that can be a first, second order and third order question that you start to ask and answer for yourself every time you see that muscle. So not only do you learn this is a latissimus, but this is what the latissimus does. If flashcards don't do it for you, then actually practically working with classmates, this is one of the few classes where actually then group studying is amazing because you could go into cadaver life, for example, and work with your classmates and say, okay, like, John, what is that? And John's like, no, no, no, you're like, that's latissimus, bro. And if John's like, what is this? You're like, a latissimus, like, no, that's up here. Then you can start correcting each other and making those connections and mental models and feeding off of each other to really gain that knowledge. And if group studying doesn't work, and you're really particularly struggling with what most students struggle with, which is the multiple choice and lecture component, then try different high yield resources for medical school. I love USMARx, which combine high yield question banks and information from things like first aid in the form of clinical vignettes. And not only are you forced to understand what parts of brachial plexus, which always trips students of what those parts are, but also what happens if something goes wrong? What does a patient look like? What functions will they not have? What will they have more of? And really being able to create those patterns. But again, you can't make the step to this far until you understand where something is, how it relates to the things around it, and then ask yourself, what does it do? And now you can ask, what happens if it doesn't work? So again, to really test your knowledge and grow your understanding and foundation of anatomy, you can do things like Anki and start to ask yourself second and third order questions. Even when you see a basic flashcard, you can also participate in group studying and things like cadaver lab. Or you can use practice questions and or you can finally use combination of these to truly get a nice kind of whole rounded understanding of how anatomy works. And then my final step is simply to make more repetitions of your checklist as you get closer to test day. So if you have a week before your anatomy lab, I've made a full video on roughly the schedule that I used in medical school. So I'll link, probably appear a video that I talked about how I would study for anatomy tips that I gave as a fourth year med student when I was a TA. So check that video out super popular here on the channel. But I talk about how I would prepare for the test if it was coming in a week when I would do certain labs, how I would do it, how I would make sure, but it really surrounds around this idea of if you have a checklist, then you can say, okay, on these days, I'm going to force myself to do these things on a checklist. I'm going to go to a cadaver and say, can I identify all these things? I'm going to go to a different cadaver and say, can I still identify all those things? If you can, you can check it off and then keep moving and moving and moving because ideally you go into your dissection, practical and segment and literally have a check next to all of these structures. I know what those are. Even if I miss a few on the actual day of the lab, most likely I'm going to do pretty well. And on a similar boat, you can do the same things when you go to your multiple choice portion or your actual lecture portion of your exam. So again, if you want to understand that full schedule, check out that video down below. So to review how to better study and prepare for anatomy, one, get an overview using a high yield resource. I love videos, use text if you want, use that for step number two, which is to create a mental model of so then you can make an adjustment to your mental model during your first pass of material, whether it's you going to lecture and saying that's actually not what I thought it'd be. Or when you go to lab and saying that is definitely not what that organ is located and making that correction. Step number three is to create a checklist of all those things. Now after you've done a few passes of your overview and going to lecture and saying these are the things that I feel like I need to know and using a tool like notion or something else to keep track of it. And then step number four is to make multiple repetitions through whatever methods that we talked about in this video to ask yourself the second and third level questions and then check off topics as you feel like you've mastered them. And then finally, as you get closer to test, repeat the process and do it more frequently. So then you can feel like not only do I know where the list of misses on this body and this body and this body, I know where they are in anybody that I possibly presented it on. And so with that guys, when I told you that it's going to be okay and I had your back, hopefully your head over heels, I promise last pun ever on how to prepare for anatomy. Now if you enjoyed this video, I really asked for one thing, which is to help this video get in front of other students who's like, I really don't know how to prepare for this class, hit that like button down below, hit it a few times just in case YouTube gives you two likes per video. I don't think that's a thing, but just just try it in case you're somebody who's been lurking here on the channel or if you're new here, hit that subscribe button to join this community for more videos like this one. I promise there'll be more videos on how to prepare for new classes and popular classes and rotations and medical school coming to this channel. So hit that subscribe button, hit that notification bell to know when those videos go live. And finally, if you're in medical school and you're like, I just want those tips and strategies that really will make me become more successful. I want to avoid those pitfalls that most students do and I want to enjoy the process. I know it's still going to be hard, but I want to enjoy the process. I want to learn how to study better, time management, productivity, stress, do well in my rotations, I want to do all my rotations, I want to do all my board exams, all those. Check out the Domination Bundle down below. It's literally all the guides and resources that I put together when I was in medical school and things that I wish that I used when I was in medical school. And it's been reviewed by hundreds of students. So check it out down below if you're interested. And if you want even more help, then check out the Medlead Academy, which combines all of our resources, including our courses and trainings and books, but also involves group coaching and group texting with me. So if you have any personal questions, you can ask those individually and I'll be happy to help you guys out. And so if you're interested, the links to all of those as well as the rest of our programs will be linked down below. But hopefully you enjoyed this video. In case you haven't hit that like button down below, hopefully this video helped you out. I promise I will not do another pun, thinking about it, but I won't. But with that being said, guys, thank you so much for being a part of this video. Thank you for watching it to the very end. Hopefully I was a little hoped to you on your anatomy journey, on your medical journey. Thanks for always being a part of mine. If you enjoyed this video, then check out this video over here on how you can better prepare for anatomy. And also check out this video on how you can prepare using Anki at Leica Pro in medical school. But until then, I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace my friends.