Things are looking good. You can just cut the tops off of the plants, as you found out, but it stalls them and might affect the couple of big colas that you get, but it looks great. The leaves are wider than what I would expect from a Sativa, but I looked at mine and they are pretty much the same. The first few sets of leaves always grows in wider than the regular leaves, so I think we are both OK. I might snap a pic of my 2...the one is getting to be growing nicely, but the one that stalled is 1/3 the size of the larger, and is now getting crowded out of light as I threw a couple seeds in a "catch all" bucket that I put gimpy, slow, or questionable plants in, with 3 plants going in this one. I ran out of room and hate to kill any growing plants, but now I feel bad because it took me so much to get these going and I only have 2...both are unknown male or female.
Keep up the good work. Mine are starting to grow an inch or so a day so I need to concentrate on training them. Sativas are tall and I don't think that photoperiod manipulation or anything else for that matter will cause them to grow compact. I've tried for 30 years and the best I can get is a somewhat shorter plant that grew in bushy compared to the regular shape. The yield wasn't as good, though because the bushy leaves blocked a lot of the bud sites and I got a lot of smaller buds from it. Re-vegging them is the easiest way to get them to grow bushier, maybe combined with your methods it might work out. Despite training as much as I really could, they outgrew the level of my light, Since the bulb is vertical and gives off a lot of side light, the leaves curled downward to get as much light exposure as they could. They were really strange looking and also very sick looking due to the curled leaves, but they were OK because the leaves were seeking the light. It's a lousy picture, but the plants were about 6.5 ft in this picture, about 6" higher than the bulb. They look horrible, but all was well. Getting a plant to grow to a low level light is not difficult, but makes for a really strange looking plant when finished.
