Honestly, this applies to not heavy lifts as well and since the word "heavy" is subjective anyway, I think that it is probably a good idea to stretch after any lifting.
This became very noticeable to me this week as I decided to double up on my chest and back exercises and DID NOT stretch afterwards and now I am paying the price.
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I figured this out in the past week after a started doing hypertrophy-oriented chest and back exercises and like a dumb shit, I did zero stretching after the fact. Fast-forward a few days and i had an itch on my back in a place that I could normally reach, and now I can't. Lucky for me I own a back scratcher and didn't have to resort to more animalistic methods.
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On one side I am kind of happy about this because it shows me that what I was doing actually did achieve what it was that i set out to do which was to damage my muscles to the point of growth but I don't really want to limit my mobility.
I think a lot of people that focus heavily on weights tend to ignore stretching and it is a mistake that I am not going to make in the future. I sit here right now with my upper back in relative agony because i did zero stretching and now I am going to have to wait a few days before that subsides.
I did some reading up on this and maintaining flexibility is actually very important in weight-lifting, although it doesn't seem so intuitive that it would be. I'm seeing this already in my lifts that I did just yesterday. I went to a flat bench machine just for a "maintenance run" which is a term I made up where I will lift about 50% my max just to remind my chest that we're still in business, we just aren't going to work very hard today.... and I found that I couldn't get my arms into the fully down position comfortably because of the lack of stretching in my routine.
According to scientists and not just people that learn by doing things the wrong way, stretching also helps to eliminate lactic acid buildup in and around muscles, and this can help to eliminate soreness and fatigue and guess what that means? It means you will be able to lift more and sooner than if you don't stretch.
Like most of the things in my repertoire, I learn these things by having done them wrong and adjusting after the fact. From this point forward instead of staring at my phone between sets I am going to instead work on stretching the muscle group that I just finished exercising. This might seem like common sense to those of you out there that exercise "smarter" than I do.
I make the mistakes so that you don't have to. I'll let you know how I feel in a week.
from a fit and trim 175 in my 20's, to a fat-ass 255 in my 30's, to the strongest I have ever been in my life 195 in my 40's. I believe if I can make this turnaround later in life, so can others