High-stress training is an umbrella term for techniques that wound the plant on purpose: removing growing tips (topping, FIM), crushing and bending stems (supercropping), or heavy pruning. The wound redirects hormones and growth, but the plant needs time to recover, usually a few days to a week per event.
In practice
HST is done in veg, or in the first week or two of flower for supercropping, on healthy, well-rooted plants. Space events out and never stack several at once on a stressed plant. Photoperiod plants tolerate HST well because veg can simply be extended. Autoflowers do not, because they cannot buy back lost days; LST is the better tool for them.
Myth check
House position: stem snapping (supercropping) gives better buds, and the founder does it all the time. This is grower practice, house-endorsed; controlled trials are lacking. Stress does not reliably raise potency, and stress beyond what the plant can recover from costs yield. See HST and supercropping.
Don't confuse with
- LST: bending without wounding.
- Stress (environmental): heat, drought or light stress; HST is mechanical.
The zone of dividing cells at the very tip of a shoot (or root) that produces new leaves, nodes and stem; removing it is what topping does.FIM is a training cut that pinches off most, but not all, of a plant's newest growing tip, often producing three or four new main shoots instead of one.Supercropping is gently crushing a stem's inner tissue between the fingers and bending it over, so the branch lowers, toughens at a knuckle and stays productive.The daily length of light versus dark; photoperiod cannabis flowers when nights grow long enough, rather than at a fixed age.A day-neutral cannabis plant that starts flowering by age, usually a few weeks after germination, regardless of light schedule; the trait is mainly recessive.LST (low-stress training) bends and ties stems so the plant grows wide and flat, exposing more bud sites to light without cutting or breaking tissue.Light stress is damage when leaves or buds absorb more light than they can use or dissipate, showing as bleached white or yellow tops nearest the fixture.Topping is cutting off a plant's main growing tip just above a node, so the two shoots below grow into two main colas instead of one.Monster cropping is taking cuttings from a plant in flower and re-vegging them, which tends to produce bushy plants with many tops after an initial slow phase.
