After you finish a workout, BulkForged automatically reviews your working sets for each exercise and decides the next target. It looks at your lowest working set — the last one is usually the hardest, so clearing your target when you're most fatigued is what earns the advance.
If that lowest set reached the top of your rep range, the weight goes up and reps reset to the bottom of the range. Otherwise the next target is simply one rep more than that lowest set. So a session inside the range still moves you forward: clear 8 in a 6–12 range and next session asks for 9. If you came in under your previous target, that same rule quietly walks the target back down rather than leaving you stuck on a number you can't reach — you're never punished for it.
The target genuinely holds when one more rep than your lowest set lands exactly on the target you already had — you came a single rep short, so it waits for you there. (On an endurance goal the engine switches to a gentler version: it adopts the reps you actually did rather than asking for one more, so there a hold means you repeated your target exactly.) A target also sits still when the session doesn't reach the engine at all — a deload week or a Light day is skipped on purpose, an exercise with no completed working sets reads as skipped, and targets are tracked per routine so the same lift logged on another day doesn't move this one. "Why didn't my target go up this session?" walks through each case. This happens automatically — on finishing a workout, and again whenever a watch-logged session syncs in — so you never have to calculate your next session's targets yourself.
Not every machine has every weight your target asks for. If you actually lifted heavier than your stored target and still hit your rep target, BulkForged adopts that heavier pin as your new working weight right away, rather than waiting for you to hit the top of your rep range first — the target only ever tracks what you can really load on the equipment in front of you.