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Randy Hetrick: How a Navy SEAL's Jiu-Jitsu Belt Became TRX
Randy Hetrick was packing for a counter-piracy operation with a Navy SEAL special missions unit when he made the mistake that would turn into a global fitness brand. "TRX was a complete accident," he told David Stark. "I was loading up for an op, grabbed a flight suit off the floor of my cage and under the flight suit... I'd accidentally scooped up my jujitsu belt." Stuck in a warehouse waiting to deploy, with no gym and no pull-up bar, he tied a knot in that belt, threw it over a bathroom door and leaned back.
That improvised strap became the TRX Suspension Trainer. In Episode 223, the 14-year Navy SEAL officer walks through the whole story: the belt, the business school detour, losing control of the company, buying it back, and his newest venture, Outfit Training.
Masochistic sports and two thousand meters of hell
Long before the SEALs, Hetrick grew up in Southern California playing "a whole bunch of different sports, some better than others," including wrestling and volleyball. At the University of Southern California he became a rower, and he's honest about what drew him to it. "I tend to like these masochistic sports where there's a high pain threshold and not a lot of crowd approval," he said.
Rowing taught him how to keep going when everything hurts. "A two thousand meter race is two thousand meters of hell," he said, and the way through it is a simple inner voice: "I got 10 more strokes in me." That mindset would serve him in the teams and, later, in the boardroom.
A belt, a bathroom door and a better idea
Back in that warehouse, Hetrick was trying to solve a simple problem. "I'm thinking about how to train the muscles, basically pull-ups, when you don't have a pull-up bar," he said. So he "threw it over that bathroom door in front of me, shut the door, lean back."
The breakthrough came with one small change. "I went wait a minute, if I moved the knot in the middle I'd have two ends coming out of the top of the door and now I could grab them both and I could do rows, I could do curls." With his body weight and gravity, a single strap could become a full training tool, and it fit in a bag.
Stanford coaches who wouldn't stop asking
After the Navy, Hetrick went to Stanford Business School. A classmate who had played football at Stanford got them into the athletes' training center, and they would bring the straps along. The strength and conditioning coaches kept coming over. In Hetrick's words, they'd say, "All right, you got to tell me what this thing is."
"All these coaches kept telling me, you know, what a remarkable thing this was. And eventually I was like, yeah, what he said." His first ambitions were modest. "I thought it was cool," he said. "I thought, well, it'd be fun to see if there's a business, a little business, in this." He bought the URL for 15 bucks online. TRX went on to become one of the best-known names in functional training.
Losing the company and buying it back
Success brought its own problems. Hetrick sold control of TRX to private equity investors, and it didn't go the way he hoped. "I sold control to some private equity guys who just turned out to be complete bumblers and took the business off a cliff," he said.
The pandemic masked the damage for a while. "I stayed on as CEO through the end of 2020. We had our best year ever, but largely on the back of the winds of the pandemic," he said, with almost 90 million in revenue. After that, in his words, "those guys somehow figured out how to run the unsinkable ship into the rocks."
So Hetrick went back for it. He partnered with Jack Daly, a former Goldman Sachs partner, to reacquire the company, and he says the business is back to profitability. He's happy with where it ended up, "although I do have a few more gray hairs and a few more wrinkle lines as a result of it."
All success is built on a pile of failure
Asked what he'd tell young athletes facing setbacks, Hetrick doesn't think failure is the right word at all. He says it doesn't really exist unless you decide you've quit. Instead, you take whatever you learned from a shortcoming and absorb it into what you know.
"All success is built on a pile of failure. That's just the reality of it, man, every single one of them." – Randy Hetrick
He applied that to one of his own weak spots: public speaking. He grew up, as he put it, in an emotionally reserved family, and he didn't like speaking in front of people. But in business, "the enemy of any startup is obscurity," so he had to get comfortable. "I had to kind of overcome an aversion to that... it takes reps, self-analysis." Today, he said, "I still get a little bit of butterflies, but I know what to do with them."
Outfit: TRX on wheels
His latest project takes the same training outside. "Outfit takes everything that TRX does indoors, outdoors," Hetrick explained. The concept is "a fleet of tricked out cargo vans," each one fitted out as "a world-class functional training gym on wheels." Booking runs through an app he described as "very Uber-like," all the gear inside is TRX, and the plan is to grow as a franchise with local owners running their own Outfit businesses.
Key takeaways
Constraints spark ideas. TRX came from having no equipment, a jiu-jitsu belt and a door.
Listen to the experts. Stanford's strength coaches told Hetrick he had something before he believed it himself.
Treat setbacks as data. "All success is built on a pile of failure."
Skills come from reps. Even public speaking improved with practice and honest self-review.
You can go back for what matters. Hetrick reacquired TRX after private equity owners ran it into trouble.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Randy Hetrick?
Randy Hetrick is the founder of TRX Training and Outfit Training. He served 14 years as a Navy SEAL officer, rowed at USC and attended Stanford Business School.
How was TRX invented?
On a counter-piracy deployment, Hetrick accidentally packed his jiu-jitsu belt. With no gym available, he tied a knot in it, threw it over a door and used it for pull-ups and rows. That improvised strap became the TRX Suspension Trainer.
What is Outfit Training?
Outfit is Hetrick's mobile fitness company: cargo vans fitted as functional training gyms, stocked with TRX gear and booked through an app. It's designed to grow as a franchise.
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