When should I increase the weight I lift?

Form decides when you go up, not the calendar and not your ego. On her video about lifting mistakes, Nikkiey says every pound you add has to be earned by form that's already locked in at your current weight. She means perfect form, not good-enough form: every rep looks the same, your joints feel clean, and your muscles are doing the work instead of momentum. If your back rounds on a Romanian deadlift, or your lower back arches on a press to move five more pounds, you didn't get stronger. You compensated. She admits this pace feels slow, and says it's what keeps women lifting injury-free for decades.

Keep the jumps small. On Ep. 16, Nikkiey uses the example of an incline chest press at 40 pounds one week and 45 the next, not 60. On one 10-step video she suggests aiming each week to add five pounds or two to three more reps. Ep. 16 adds a caveat: some weeks you won't hit it, and you may stay at the same weight for two weeks or longer. That's normal. In one workout video she points out that people jump 10 to 15 pounds when five would do. In that same session the five-pound bump still felt light and she went up again, so treat five pounds as a starting point and let your reps tell you.

Nikkiey also warns about the opposite problem. She calls lifting too light the biggest risk in the weight room after 40. She describes a woman who used the same pink dumbbells for four months and saw nothing change. Once she moved up in weight, she saw more change in six weeks than in the four months before. The lifting wasn't failing her. The weight was too light.