 Today I'm going to be breaking down the entire strategy that I use to study for and ace my anatomy practicals in medical school. Now I'm really excited for this episode. It's definitely going to be a step by step in a much more detailed episode and some of my other videos. So feel free to jump around using the bookmarks down below and obviously if you find the content helpful, make sure you leave the like as well as let me know what questions you have in the comment section down below. Now my personal strategy of doing well on my anatomy practicals essentially has a three-step component. One is making sure that I have my preparation before going into lab to I have a very strategic thing on what to do during and after the lab, as well as how to strategically prepare for that practical exam when it's time. In a future episode I'll also be breaking down how to study for your anatomy lectures effectively. So be ready for those exams. So make sure you subscribe to the channel to be notified when that video goes out. But the big concept of strategically studying for anatomy practicals is imagine that at the very start everything is going to be a blurry image and being okay with that. So for example, just go ahead and blur the screen and you can barely make out what I look like, who I am, can't really tell very much. But just like anatomy, things are going to look very blurry initially. You have no idea if it's an artery or vein or a nerve. But as you do strategic studying and repetition, which we'll talk about, things start to get a little bit more clear. At this point, with some guidance, you may be able to tell what's what, but it's still not quite ready for your anatomy practical, so you need more strategic repetition. And then things will become clearer and clearer until, boom, the full image is crystal clear. And you know exactly what that is. You can look at that artery and saying, I thought that was a vein, but it's actually the carotid. Good to know. Super important. And that thing that I thought was a spaghetti noodle is actually the phrenic nerve. And now you're ready to take your anatomy practical. So throughout today's episode, I'm going to be breaking down the strategy of how to make things clearer, very strategically. So first let's go ahead and start with how to prepare for your lab before you even go in. Now, my personal opinion, the more prepared you are going into lab, the more effective it will be to build your foundation. The same way that, for example, if you're building an IKEA furniture, if everything kind of looks the same and you kind of just read the instructions very briefly, it still doesn't make sense. But if you know what the pieces look like and you've read the instructions detail, then when it's time to build it, at least not for IKEA furniture, but for normal furniture, it's a little bit easier in the same setting. Before you go into your anatomy lab, you want to make sure that you're as prepared as possible and have some rough mental model of what you're going to be expected to be seen. So let's break this down into its own individual mini steps. So step one is to identify your most helpful resource to really understand the dissection. Now, most institutions will usually give you kind of a dissection guide and often some video associated with the dissection that you're expected to do. If you have access to these, these are probably all you need in a great place to start to get an overall foundation of what you'll be expected to see the next day in lab. Your institution only gives you the text, but not the videos. And just go ahead and Google the dissection that you'll be doing and then find it on YouTube. And people have done great jobs of showing examples and they'll be very similar to things that other institutions share with their own students. Now, once you've identified these high yield resources, the most important out of the video and the text for me personally is the video. Usually I recommend to go ahead and skim and watch that first video really quickly just to understand what dissection will be doing, what kind of things that they're focused on. And again, you're not trying to memorize. You're not trying to learn. You're just getting an idea of like, okay, this is roughly what I'll be doing the next day. Now, step two is to use the second high yield resource, the text and actually read your dissection guide. So now that you watch the video, you kind of have a visual representation of where things are, what things should look like. And then you'll be doing your dissection guide and like, oh, I remember them actually doing this paragraph that I was talking about in the video. If your dissection guide is written well and not only will they have instructions, but also relationships between structures. So they may say things like this muscle is going to be anterior and then posteriorly, you're going to find this artery and this nerve go on the backside of it from lateral to medial. When you're reading your dissection guide and text, it's important to pick up on these relationships when they're pointed out, but not for the goal of memorizing them right now, but mainly to be able to create some kind of mental model. After watching the video, you can be like, oh yeah, I remember them actually pointing to the artery, the vein and the nerve in the video. And here's the text talking about it. Now, step three, after you read your dissection guide and gotten common gist of the relationships as well as individual structures is possibly to go ahead and watch that video of the dissection again. Now that you actually understand what things you'll be expected to do, you've seen the lab happen once, you've understood the text, now go ahead and actually watch the video for understanding. I'm saying, oh, there's the carotid. Right about it, I've seen it now twice. It may seem redundant, but all of this is going to be helping you create an effective mental model before even going into dissection. And then finally step four is to create a hit list of everything you're expected to learn. So usually the dissection guys that are effective already have a hit list at the very end of the chapter, but that they don't try to carry it some kind of words, document and notion or just Microsoft Word or a piece of paper, if you're a fan of notebook and add all the structures that you're expected to find the next day in lab, ideally in the order that you'll be expected to find them. And if you're going to create a digital copy, consider it even printing out one that you can take the dissection lab, it is okay to get dirty because now you have a running list of things in order that you should be expected to find before you walk out of lab that day. And then finally, step five is optional but highly recommended is to use an online resource to truly solidify your mental model. Now, one of my favorite free resources to use include websites like AnatomyZone. Now, if you're not familiar, it's essentially a YouTube channel that is now a website, but you can look at the dissection you'll do the next day. So let's say you're going to do the thorax. You can actually say, let me go ahead and watch a video on the anatomy of the heart before actually do the dissection myself. Now if you watch the demonstration of the dissection, you've read about the dissection and you watched the video one more time, this is a great way to say, oh, cool. Like the video looked a little messy, the dissection wasn't a clean but this is where things should be related. And again, you're creating a mental model and most importantly, identifying structures that you're hearing over and over again, you can't help but start memorizing names, even a little bit of things you'll be expected to do, again, before you even go into lab. While free resources like AnatomyZone are great, there are some paid resources that I absolutely love recommending, including our sponsor for today's episode, which is Kenhub. Now Kenhub is one of my favorite resources to recommend for anatomy because it includes everything from start to finish as we talk about the entire prep to study effectively for your practical as well as your lecture. But to show effectively how Kenhub works, let's go in and find a structure. So because we did thorax in the last example, let's go ahead and click on thorax here. Now the nice thing about Kenhub is essentially have individual modules for different parts of that same area of the body. So for example, if we go back into the heart, we have multiple different modules about individual things that are gonna get into a lot more detail. So let's actually just talk about the surface anatomy of the heart. Now the beauty of Kenhub is that if you're somebody who enjoys text and reading and then they obviously have everything there for you, it's written very nice, but it's also still very high yield. But they also have their own video content for each individual module. And most importantly, those videos are short and you can actually speed them up even more using their own video player. But arguably the part about Kenhubs and their modules that I enjoy the most are these quizzes. Now, again, you wanna create a mental model for a structure before we go to anatomy lab. And while of course you can go ahead and take the time to make your own flashcards and images for your labs, why not just use Kenhub's database to practice identifying important structures. So if I click start quiz, the nice thing about Kenhub is that they stratified depending on how well of that information you've truly mastered. So there's a preview of what this will look like often. You'll have images either one or two and they're gonna be asking you to click which one represents the anterior surface. So there's ideally this one, cool, into the heart. And then you can do the same for the rest of the structure, both abroad as well as an individual. Now, in addition to having this effective models, Kenhub also does a great job of having their own question and multiple choice question bank to effectively study for those lecture exams as well as your practicals. But they also have some cool additions such as histology and learning X-rays. I made an entire video of how you can use Kenhub effectively and why I love it so much. If you guys are interested in trying Kenhub for your own anatomy experience, I'll link down below a description also with a very generous discount from the team from Kenhub. And as always, thanks for Kenhub for being a sponsor of today's video.