This chapter is devoted to Merleau-Ponty’s account of motor intentional movement as silhouetted by the Schneider case (that of an injured soldier suffering psychological blindness, cognitive rigidity and impaired motility outside habitual action situations). I show how Merleau-Ponty insightfully understands motor intentionality or motor projection as the work of the body schema organising both our postural changes and our phenomenal fields towards habitual or novel outcomes in a horizonal and context-sensitive manner. Without this sub-reflective projection of somatic action solutions and routes to realisation, we would have an agency-neutral body and a congealed spatiality. I maintain that imagined actions supposing skill transpositions can be extrapolated from Merleau-Ponty’s theory, showing that we are not locked into habitual actions or milieus. I go on to argue that he neglects little acts of reflection that compensate for threats to the flow of ‘skilled coping’, while contending that this shortcoming is easily rectified.

What role is played by habitual behaviors in sport skill? To answer this question we examine and contrast two different views on habit: the intellectualist and the enactivist. Intellectualism, which can be traced back to William James’ mechanist account of habits as reflex-like automatic dispositions, claims that deliberation and explicit goal-representation are necessary to make behavior intelligent and flexible because habits alone do not have this capacity. Enactivism, on the contrary, claims that habits are both necessary for and constitutive of the development of sports skills because they can be inherently intelligent and flexible. After reviewing behavioral and neuro-cognitive evidence in favour of each view, we offer an anti-intellectualist argument to support the enactivist view: habitual behaviors are legitimate sources of prereflective motivation and bodily know-how. Accordingly, skillful action control is not constrained but disclosed by habit formation. Automatism then is not a drawback for strategic control and improvisation but their pragmatic foundation.