Ten mistakes to avoid when training your cannabis plants

First, let’s give you some advice if you haven’t done any cannabis plant training before.

Don’t try and master all the techniques in one go, learn them one by one over time.

Additionally, you can’t train a cannabis plant by talking to it. Saying “sit”, “beg” and “roll over” will not change the way your plant behaves.

We would also advise you to only train the healthiest of your plants – training is stressful and plants need time to recover afterwards.

For that reason, our first common mistake is to carry out more than one training method at a time as that will have a fair chance of killing your plants.

The next common mistake is not carrying out any training, as this means you can’t optimise your growing space.

Fourth, top too early and you will stunt growth, while fifth, if you top too late, you’ll end up with a plant looking like a Christmas tree!

Aim to top after three to five nodes exist.

It is easy to snap branches if you try and train your plants when they are not sufficiently mature. Best done after topping and not when plants are young as they cannot deal with stress.
Fimming and defoliating must be done before flowering. Doing so once flowering occurs will hammer the yield.

Mainlining involves topping a plant a number of times. However, do this repeatedly when the plant growth is too young will end up taking the plant longer to recover, reduces air circulation and encourages mould and disease.

Don’t use ties that can damage your plants. When carrying out low stress training (LST) tie down the branches avoiding rigid plastic and metal and instead think about using bending clips.
It can be a very costly mistake to forget to support heavy cannabis buds. While breeding and genetics have helped increase the size of buds, increased branch strength is still lagging behind and a heavy crop of buds can lead to branches snapping.

Use trellises or a tomato cage as examples of effective support for cannabis plants.
While defoliation is good to let light through to critical areas of your cannabis plants, over-defoliation can do so much more harm than good.

Only remove leaves once a plant is mature enough and is full-on vegetating.
Don’t carry out high-stress training (HST) on weak or autoflowering plants as the growing period is too short to allow plants to recover afterwards.

Don’t be too worried though, cannabis plants can be pretty forgiving and provided you don’t make all the above mistakes, you should be okay.

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