Hi everyone! I’ve been wondering when you know it’s the right time to increase the weight on your main lifts. Do you wait until all your sets feel comfortable, follow a fixed progression, or use RPE/RIR? I sometimes add weight too early and my form suffers, but I also don’t want to progress too slowly. How do you decide it’s time to increase the load?
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Howdy! Welcome to the forum. We appreciate having you 
This is a good question, and the fact that you find your form falls apart when you add weight is a useful tell on timing. In a perfect world, you’d add weight and the effort, velocity, ROM, etc. would all stay the same. A change in technique likely affects all of these (or is the result of these variables changing), so either way, I think having a better strategy for progressive overload is useful.
To clarify a general concept, you don’t add weight to get stronger. You get stronger, and then you’re able to add weight. The bar going up is the result of the adaptation, not the thing that causes it. So the job isn’t to force weight onto the bar on a schedule, it’s to read whether you actually got stronger and let that make the call.
One way to tell when you’ve gotten stronger is to see the RPE of a set at a given weight for a specific movement go down. Say your sets of 5 at 225 is a have been sitting at RPE 8. You add weight when that same 225 drops to a 7, or moves faster and easier than it used to, and not before. While it still feels like an 8, you repeat it. Repeating isn’t wasted work, you’re stacking productive stress that adds up to the next jump. Loading 230 and grinding it to a 9 or 10 when 225 was still an 8 didn’t make you stronger, it just made more fatigue and uglier reps. That’s the form breakdown you’re describing.
Alternatively/additionally, you could use your last warm up set as an anchor to tell you if you’re stronger (or not) day to day. This can be especially useful when using the same final warm up weight week to week.
We have some resources on this you may find helpful:
-Jordan
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Thanks @Jordan_Feigenbaum for sharing helpful information. also thanks for welcome me to the forum.
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Of course. This community means a lot to me. I’m happy to have you!