I am one of the anatomy TAs at my school. I don't know how tough anatomy is at your school, but at mine it is kind of a big deal. That being said, I will tell you how I studied for anatomy.
1. Buy an atlas that has color photos of actual cadavers. Make sure the structures are labeled the same way as your lab books wants you to learn them. I then proceeded to buy Post-It notes that were the smaller size (see below) and cover up the names of the structures but leaving the arrow visible. That way I could study outside of the lab the structures and match a name to them.
2. Use the open lab times if your school offers them. At my school, closed lab is when you are scheduled to be in the cadaver room with the TAs. Open lab is when the TAs are not there, but student assistants (SAs) are there to answer questions. Open lab was open to all students enrolled in anatomy and you could come study the bodies for 3 hours per weekday and 12 hours on Saturdays. I would go to 4 hours of open lab per week along with my 3 hours of regular, closed lab time.
3. NEVER FALL BEHIND! Anatomy starts off fast and will only get faster. Each week we had to learn 150-200 structures/names. We had three weeks of material and then a test. If you slacked off for two weeks, you suddenly had a week to learn 600 names. Not really doable. Make sure you study every week, knowing the material well before moving on to the new stuff in your lab.
4. Don't be afraid to teach other people. I would go to open lab and not really know the stuff. I wasn't sure about my notes and didn't feel comfortable studying it on my own. Luckily, there are tons of other people trying to learn it too. Ask people if they want you to quiz them. That means you show a structure and have them say the name aloud. Keep showing them things until you have the names in your head too. Repetition is key.
5. Study how they test. For us, our test consists of 75 blank lines and the TAs point to a structure and have the students write out the name. You can tell who studied correctly (and I will get to that in a second) the moment the first structure is shown. If your tests are like this, then it doesn't make sense to look at a name in your lab book and then find the structure on the body. You have to work backwards! This is where the quizzing I mentioned earlier comes into play. If you study the body first and match a name to each structure rather than studying a name and matching it to a structure, you will be much better off. Sounds weird, but trust me.
6. Don't worry. Study a little bit every day. Learning 200 names at once is tough, so only learn 50 a day. That is totally doable.
