Suggestions for Learning MSK Anatomy

In most anatomy classes will have you memorize bones, muscles, nerves, and arteries/veins. It can be a lot of facts to absorb so here are a few good ways to approach it so that it makes more sense and is easier to learn/retain. The first time I tried to learn this was my second year of med school and I ended up trying to memorize lists of structures. It was difficult. It was boring. I retained next to nothing. Second time through I learned it for a sports medicine rotation and realized this stuff is pretty straight forwards. It's all basic, basic mechanical engineering

So here's a good plan of attack, starting with the order you learn things.

1. Learn anatomy by major joints. For the leg, learn hip first, then knee, then lower leg/ankle, then foot. For the arm, learn the scapula/shouler, elbow, wrist/hand. Joints are where muscles do their job so this is where they matter.

2. Learn the bones first

• Just get a basic idea of what the bone looks like and to which other bones it connects to
• Do not worry about each little detail at this point, just big picture, little details will make way more sense after you've learned the muscles so just skip them for now
• Example: when learning the knee, get a basic idea of the humerus, tibia, and fibula (the only three bones around) and where they connect. Worry about ligaments later, we're just getting a general outline at this point.

3. Learn the muscles next

• This is where the money is in terms of why we care about this anatomy. Muscles are what move us around and they are what often get pulled and torn and take people in to see the doctor
• Organize the muscles into categories based around what they do. Each joint has a maximum of 6 movements that you care about and most have fewer. The six movements are flex, extend, abduct (move away from body), adduct (bring toward body; "add to body"), rotate in, rotate out. Figure out which movements the joint you're studying does and then figure out which muscles do each movement. Most movements have multiple muscles doing them.
• Organizing muscles by which movement they do will help with organization, but will also help with later stuff because if they're doing similar actions, chances are they are in similar places and have similar nerve and blood supply. Also, this is how doctors think about muscles when they're diagnosing injuries.

4. Learn the nerves

• Learn nerves by which group of muscles they serve and what action they make the body do. Do not worry about the exact path they follow through the body right now. Again, it will make more sense after you have a better global understanding of the anatomy and will just bog you down at this point.
• For example: when learning the wrist, know the radial nerve is what causes the wrist to extend because it connects with the muscles of the top of the forearm. Also just memorize (if you have to) at what level this nerve leaves the spinal cord.
• So learn where a nerve starts, where it ends, what action it does, and what muscles it connects to. Come back after you've got all this down and then learn details about the exact course they follow. It will make a lot more sense later on.

5. Learn the arteries/veins

• When learning arteries or veins at any time, always start from the beginning and chart them out from there. That usually means starting at the aorta and branching out from there for arteries and either the superior vena cava or inferior vena cava for veins. This may seem like overkill but there are actually only a few major vessels and everything else branches or flows into these. If you do this you will get a much better conceptual idea of where all these branches come from which will make it seem less daunting a task to remember and will help you retain this all a lot better. Also, this will help you think about medical problems in a much clearer way.

That's it. The MSK system can seem daunting if you're learning from an excel spreadsheet listing individual muscles, their innervation, their blood supply, and their action. But if you can approach these in a rational way, you'll find that though there are a lot of facts, this stuff is not complicated and actually interesting.