The objective of this paper is the automatic recognition of human actions in video sequences. The use of spatio-temporal features for action recognition has become very popular in recent literature Instead of extracting the spatio-temporal features from the raw video sequence, some authors propose to project the sequence to a single template first. As a contribution we propose the use of several variants of the R transform for projecting the image sequences to templates. The R transform projects the whole sequence to a single image, retaining information concerning movement direction and magnitude. Spatio-temporal features are extracted from the template, they are combined using a bag of words paradigm, and finally fed to a SVM for action classification. The method presented is shown to improve the state-of-art results on the standard Weizmann action dataset