Attached is a pic of my most compressed-looking plant. Do my annotations make sense -- do I know what I'm doing here?
I think you need to be perfectly clear in what you're trying to achieve here and why you're trying to achieve it. Firstly, topping and FIMing plants stresses them, is it a good time to be doing that right now when they're recovering from a previous problem?
You also need to be aware that 'topping and 'FIMing' are two different techniques used for different reasons. People top plants generally to keep height down and to encourage greater lateral and side branching, which are good for taking clones from. It does this because the hormones and auxins at the growing tips switch from the top growth taken away to the side growing shoots. The plant basically gets more bushy laterally, rather than growing taller.
FIMing is a slightly different technique to 'topping' and produces a different result. To FIM a plant you take off the top growing meristem along with the emerging leaves from it. The 'FIM' cut is made higher than the 'topping' cut and it does two things: 1) it encourages the leaves cut through to form separate colas, and encourages the side shoots and growing tips to grow taller and catch up with the now slowed down top growth, so you basically get more colas, than one large central one.
The other thing to remember is that both toping and FIMing plants stresses them and it can take 1-2 weeks for the growth to resume, so you need to allow at least 1-2 weeks after topping and FIMing before flowering. Also, not all plants like to be topped and FIMed, some do and respond well to it and some don't.
If this is your first grow, my advice would be to leave well alone and let the plants grow naturally. Once you've got more experience by all means experiment with this, but you need to understand natural plant growth and what plants do when grown naturally before you can start influencing their growth behaviours in this way.
Good luck with whatever you decide to do.
