A profusion of new classes of distributions has recently proven useful to applied statisticians working in various areas of scientific investigation. Generalizing existing distributions by adding shape parameters leads to more flexible models. We define a new lifetime model called the transmuted generalized modified Weibull distribution from the family proposed by Aryal and Tsokos [1], which has a bathtub shaped hazard rate function. Some structural properties of the new model are investigated. The parameters of this distribution are estimated using the maximum likelihood approach. The proposed model turns out to be quite flexible for analyzing positive data. In fact, it can provide better fits than related distributions as measured by the Anderson-Darling ($A^*$) and Cramér-von Mises ($W^*$) statistics, which is illustrated by applying it to two real data sets. It may serve as a viable alternative to other distributions for modeling positive data arising in several fields of science such as hydrology, biostatistics, meteorology and engineering.