Abstract Recent works use 3D convolutional neural networks to explore spatio-temporal information for human action recognition. However, they either ignore the correlation between spatial and temporal features or suffer from high computational cost by spatio-temporal features extraction. In this work, we propose a novel and effificient Mutually Reinforced Spatio-Temporal Convolutional Tube (MRST) for human action recognition. It decomposes 3D inputs into spatial and temporal representations, mutually enhances both of them by exploiting the interaction of spatial and temporal information and selectively emphasizes informative spatial appearance and temporal motion, meanwhile reducing the complexity of structure. Moreover, we design three types of MRSTs according to the different order of spatial and temporal information enhancement, each of which contains a spatio-temporal decomposition unit, a mutually reinforced unit and a spatio-temporal fusion unit. An end-to-end deep network, MRST-Net, is also proposed based on the MRSTs to better explore spatiotemporal information in human actions. Extensive experiments show MRST-Net yields the best performance, compared to state-of-the-art approaches.