Human action recognition involves recognizing and classifying actions performed by humans. It has many applications, including sports, healthcare, and surveillance. Challenges such as a limited number of classes of activities and variations within inter and intra-class groups lead to high misclassification rates in some of the intelligent systems developed. Existing studies focused mainly on using public datasets with little focus on real-life action datasets, with limited research on HAR for military obstacle-crossing activities.  This paper focuses on recognizing human actions in an obstacle-crossing competition video sequence where multiple participants are performing different obstacle-crossing activities. This study proposes a feature descriptor approach that combines a Histogram of Oriented Gradient and Region Descriptors (HOGReG) for human action recognition in a military obstacle crossing competition. The dataset was captured during military trainees’ obstacle-crossing exercises at a military training institution to achieve this objective. Images were segmented into background and foreground using a Grabcut-based segmentation algorithm, and thereafter, features were extracted and used for classification. The features were extracted using a Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) and region descriptors from segmented images. The extracted features are presented to a neural network classifier for classification and evaluation. The experimental results recorded 63.8%, 82.6%, and 86.4% recognition accuracies using the region descriptors HOG and HOGReG, respectively. The region descriptor gave a training time of 5.6048 seconds, while HOG and HOGReG reported 32.233 and 31.975 seconds, respectively. The outcome shows how effectively the suggested model performed.