Methods, apparatus, systems, and articles of manufacture are disclosed that perform bounds checking on authorized memory allocations during pointer arithmetic. In some examples, instruction decode circuitry decodes an update pointer instruction for a pointer. In some examples, bounds checking circuitry determines an authorized allocation for the pointer, determines one or more exclusion zones and poison zones for the pointer. In some examples, bounds checking circuitry updates the pointer and generates a fault if the pointer points to one of the exclusion zones and poisons the pointer if the pointer points to one of the poison zones.