Since the 1950-ies, the dominating silvicultural system in Sweden has included establishment and management of even-aged stands, including final felling. Alternative systems such as continuous cover forestry are increasingly catching interest due the lower impact on stand structure and biodiversity advantages for shade-tolerant species. However it is unknown especially to southern Sweden how trees in a continuous cover forestry system react to common silvicultural measures such as thinning. Therefore the effect of different levels of thinning on the radial growth of larger trees was measured and compared to the ingrowth and proportion of live crown at a site in Östergötland. Unlike previous findings the radial growth was higher in the treatment that had been slightly thinned than in the one that had been heavily thinned. The ability to react with increased radial growth after thinning was not depending on the thinning regime but on the tree’s reaction to a previous thinning. Only trees that had not reacted to the previous thinning increased in radial growth. The radial growth varied more within a treatment than between treatments, which points at the difficulty to allocate growth to specific trees.