ABSTRACT
Forward head posture [FHP] is one of the most common faulty postures to be accompanied by the deep neck stabilizer muscle weakness. Physiotherapists usually recommend using the chin-tuck exercises to correct this faulty posture. This study has been designed to examine the effect of added stabilizing exercise to the Chin-tuck exercise on FHP correction. It was a quasi-experimental study. Forty seven university female students who had FHP, were assigned randomly in one of two comparison groups, an experimental group [receiving combined intervention of chin-tuck and stabilization exercises, n=24] or a control group [receiving only the chin-tuck exercise intervention, n=23]. Participants were completed their exercise protocol twice daily for four weeks. The amount of forward head displacement was measured before and immediately after four weeks' intervention and after three months' follow-up too. After intervention, significantly decreased in the FHP was seen in both experimental [mean=2.1 cm, P<0.0001] and control [mean=1 cm, P=0.03] groups. The comparison of the mean changes of forward head displacement between groups indicated the significantly more FHP correction in the experimental group immediately after intervention [mean difference=1.1 cm, P=0.001] and also after a three months follow-up periods [mean difference=1.7 cm, P<0.0001], compared to the control group. Our results showed that the combination of stabilization exercises and chin-tuck exercises provide not only the better correction effect for FHP patients, but could be provided a more effective and stable corrected posture. More study might be needed to investigate the effect of single stabilization exercise protocol on the forward head posture correction