So me personally grow medicine for my wife and fruit and veggies for us and the kids...Most of the training that I do is for mmj or Medical Marijuanna. Here is a little step by step that I do to train my plants, to give me the best use of my lights in my tent.
Low Stress Training, or LST is gently bending your plants, to make the shape that you want to create to get the most light for your plant. The more light you can get on your plant, the more successful grown you will have. This will create a low relativly even plant, but have multiple colas like a rose bush instead of a christmas tree. Plus the more training that your plants have before flower, the bigger buds that you will have on there as well. Also LST will not stunt the growth on your plant, like other methods will
"Benefits of Low Stress Training
Bigger yields from the exact same grow lights and setup
Complete control over height, shape and size of plant (helpful both indoors and outdoors!)
Plants produce many big buds instead of just a single main bud and a lot of tiny ones"
What I am trying to acheive when I LST my plant, I am looking for a start pattern as looking from above. That way I am able to get light into the center of the plant, as well as the outside limbs. Doing so I will have more Colas and less sun leaves. I usually use tomato cages, because they are 1 a perfect caged circle, so I can get that inside star, as well an an upward spiral. Kind of like below, that way you can take your light and put it right in the middle.
The bonus on this is that all the buds will be in a path of light, allowing for growth and still only water 1 plant, but recieve more good grade medicine.
So now I have my plant trained the way that I want it and 2 weeks before Flower, I need another pot, because when the plant is in flower, it will grow 1.5x its height in flower. So we need to transplant. Which is taking the pot and soil and putting it in another bigger pot. First I flush with sugar water for a week to remove as much of the veg chemicals as I can, to make way for new Flowering Chemicals, which have some of the same, but more of the new. So I take my pot, put some soil in it and push it to the sides, making a bowl in the middle. Take my plant and roots out of pot number one and put into new pot. CAREFULLY. Now that I have my plant in the new pot, I will to the rim with new soil. Water with my flowering setup, also ph'd to 6.0. Just watch as the budless plant starts to develope into a thing of beauty.
I will put up another post later this week on flowering, what to look out for in the flowering stages before the final cut and how to get the best bang for your time.
Non trained plant
LST trained plant
Which would you prefer...
all images found on Google Images.
Smoke on....
http://www.growweedeasy.com/low-stress-training-lst