Here's what I do.
Once clones are rooted and transplanted into soil and have started vertical growth, I top them immediately after I have two nodes to work with. I top and prune the lowers, if any, so there are four fan leaves and four shoots growing from them. Two nodes worth of growth.
Then let them grow until the two dominant shoots are around 8" long. By this time it's time to transplant from the #1 pot to the final 7gal pot 1/2 filled with super soil. After the plants have a day or two to settle in the new pot and are snug and happy in their new homes, I begin gradually training the dominant shoots until they are nearly parallel with the soil line. This may take a few days, you don't want to do it all at once and risk breaking the stalk. When these shoots are trained out properly, their new growth should now be below the two lower secondary shoots.
Those shoots are now the dominant shoots and after a day or two will begin to explode with upward growth because they are now getting the apical dominance hormones. Once they've grown up to roughly the size of the original dominant shoots, begin to train them out until their new growth is even with the new growth on the other two shoots. Now you have a nice, wide bush and because all of the growth is now at nearly the same level, the growth hormones are distributed evenly throughout the plant.
Now you just let her grow. Every node on the plant will now give you a shoot growing upwards and you will end up with a nice bushy sphere of goodness.
Let them veg out for seven or eight weeks from clone and you will end up with a gigantic bush full of primo tops. Prune away all the lower crap before bloom and then again two weeks into bloom and you'll have nothing but killer nuggage. The key is canopy management. Try and keep it all on the same level. If you train the plant properly, you won't have any shoots that are much dominant than others and will kind of spread the stretch evenly around all of the many tops that are now growing into a wide bush instead of a plant with tall dominant main shoots. Some plants don't like to be trained, but based on Chernobyl's genetics, I'd bet a dollar that she'll love it.
Also, environment will help to keep the stretch down. The less of a difference between day and night temps, the less stretching, in my experience.
1kw lights helps too, lol.
Good luck, brother. Just keep in mind that Chernobyl isn't a huge yielder. You might be barking up the wrong tree if your goal is production.
