Meet Tom Bish, The Christian Pastor And Above-The-Knee Amputee Who Set CT Power-Lifting Records

What started as a normal Saturday turned into anything but when Tom Bish, the Christian pastor who is also an above-the-knee amputee, walked into the gym. He had a smile on his face, as is normally the case with Bish. 

Both Bish and I have the same trainer, Sam McCue of Cue Coaching. McCue invited the two of us to an open gym to work out. I have seen Bish at the gym many times, as he and I have both been training with Sam for years. 

However, because our training sessions usually butt up against one another, we never had time for more than short rounds of small talk and the standard casual pleasantries. 

Sam McCue (left), personal trainer and founder of Cue Coaching, Tom Bish (center), Christian Pastor and above-the-knee amputee, and Dan Zaksheske (right), OutKick reporter.

(Dan Zaksheske/OutKick)

On this day, however, I asked Bish if he wanted to train together. He happily accepted and said he wanted to bench press. 

"Fantastic, I love benching," I thought. 

Tom Bish is an older man, in his late 60s, but strong for his age. Still, his max bench is quite a bit lower than mine, so I figured his workout would be much less intensive than mine. 

That was where I was wrong. After we each got in some stretching on our own, we met at the bench for the first set. 

"Where do you want to start?" I asked. 

"Let’s throw 95lbs on the bar," he replied. 

Normally, I would start with a higher weight. But my goal was just to keep it simple and follow Bish’s lead. 

"How many reps are you looking to get?" I asked. 

"Ten," he said. 

So, I hit the bench and quickly repped out 95 lbs. 20 times. That was a good warm up for me. 

Bish laid down, but not before sliding a plate under his left leg. Because he has a prosthetic leg, he needs a plate to elevate his left foot. 

Tom Bish, a Christian pastor who is also an above-the-knee amputee, set multiple Connecticut state records in power-lifting in 2024 and plans to continue competing.

(Dan Zaksheske/OutKick)

I sauntered around the gym while Bish did his reps, not wanting him to feel watched. However, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that he was doing many more than the 10 reps he said he planned to hit.

"How many was that?" I asked when he finished. 

"Twenty," he replied. 

"Hm," I thought to myself. "Is he trying to compete with me?" 

For the next set, we increased the weight to 135 lbs. I hit a quick 12 reps and ceded the bench.

He laid down, slid the plate under his left foot, and hit 12 reps. 

"OK, he’s definitely trying to keep up with me," I thought to myself. "Let’s put him to the test." 

Same result. I hit 155 lbs. for ten reps and Bish immediately followed suit. But, he wasn’t done. 

Bish kept pace for almost the entirety of the workout, eventually hitting a new personal record of 210 lbs. for one rep. 

"Dang," I said, with a smile. "Seems like you had a little extra motivation today." 

"I did," he replied with a matching smile. "I wanted to beat you." 

That story epitomizes Tom Bish, or "Pastor Bish" as he is known at Heritage Baptist Church in Wallingford, CT, where he preaches. 

When someone tells him he can’t do something, or they think he can’t, he wants to prove them wrong. 

Following our bench workout, I started to talk with him. I knew he was a Christian pastor, because I had asked McCue in the past, but I wanted to know more about his story. 

I had never asked him about the amputation because, frankly, I didn’t know him that well, and I didn’t want to pry. Some people don’t want to talk about those things, and I didn’t want him to feel pressured into sharing life details that he wasn’t comfortable discussing. 

Turns out, I was wrong about that, too. Bish was happy to tell me his story. 

Back in 2007, doctors diagnosed him with osteosarcoma in his left foot. Initially, they believed he had an infection that was causing him terrible pain in his foot. He spent six months on antibiotics and steroids before doctors realized he had bone cancer. 

Following his cancer diagnosis in January, doctors amputated his foot in May 2007. Bish explained that he had to learn how to walk again without one of his feet. 

"I learned how to walk, and I even walked without a limp," Bish explained. "People who knew me would kind of stare because they couldn't figure out which foot I was missing." 

However, that was far from the end of Bish's health problems. 

"In 2010, I woke up one night with horrendous nerve pain at the bottom of the limb. It was like I was getting tasered or electrocuted," he said. 

Turns out, Bish had developed tumors at the amputation site and required surgery to remove them. But when doctors got in there to do the removal, they realized that it was worse than expected, and they had to amputate two more inches of his leg. 

"I had to get a new prosthesis and I had to start over from the beginning again. So mentally, that was a little hard," Bish explained. 

Unfortunately, Bish wasn't the only one who would receive a cancer diagnosis. In January 2017, his wife was diagnosed with stage-four brain cancer. She died 11 months later. 

Six months after losing his wife, Bish started to experience pain in his left leg again. 

"The pain from my limb was so bad I couldn't stand it. I ended up crawling to the second floor, where I lived, because I couldn't put any pressure on my leg," Bish recounted. 

"[I saw] tumors on the outside [of the leg] and they weren't there earlier in the day." 

Bish returned to the doctors and had the tumors removed. But more tumors grew and, in August 2018, doctors had to remove almost all of his left leg due to osteomyelitis, a bone infection. 

Once again, Bish had to start from square one, this time without the support of his beloved wife. 

"I got my first prosthesis above the knee about two months after the surgery," he said. "I was pushing myself, and I was on crutches for one week. I went to a cane after a second week, and after that I put the cane away, and I was just walking." 

Because Bish was walking on his own, his insurance company decided he no longer needed physical therapy – just 11 weeks after he received a prosthetic leg. 

Bish had never been the type of person who went to the gym, but he knew that he needed to continue therapy. He had to do it on his own, since insurance decided to cut him off. 

His attempts to find a personal trainer were initially unsuccessful, until someone told him about McCue.

"There was a guy in my amputee support group that trained with Sam McCue," Bish said. "So, after the meeting, I drove over to the [gym] and just walked in. I didn't know his name or anything at the time and the guy at the front desk said, 'You want Sam.'"

"When Tom came to me, he told me that other trainers said they ‘couldn’t help him,’" McCue said. "But I knew I could help him because I could see how dedicated he was to the idea of getting stronger." 

McCue had worked with an amputee in the past, and he said that he never approached adaptive athletes any differently than he would an able-bodied client. 

"When I was a new trainer, my second client ever was a below-the-knee amputee, and I was just eager to help anybody," McCue said. "I didn't look at anyone's situation as an obstacle that I couldn't overcome as a coach or that they couldn't overcome as a client."

McCue said Tom's situation wasn't all that unique – at least not as it pertained to his lack of a previous fitness background. 

"Most people that I work with are new to fitness in general; probably about 95% of new clients typically don't have a great fitness background or aren't educated in fitness, whether that's exercise or nutrition," he said.

"So, the approach is kind of the same for most new clients, whether they are adaptive or able-bodied, it's just a little more focused on finding unique avenues that work with their situation, whether that be a unique set-up of equipment or adapting the way that they're going to move with their prosthetic." 

McCue currently has multiple amputee clients, including Rick, who lost both of his legs. 

Bish told me that in the beginning of his journey into fitness, he and McCue had to find creative ways to lift weights. 

"The first session I failed at everything really, because I just didn't know how [how the prosthetic leg] worked, and Sam needed to see what I could or could not do," Bish said.

"It'd been a long year or so losing my wife, the osteomyelitis and the surgery. After the first session, I thought Sam was going to tell me that this wasn't going to work. Instead, he said, 'Hey, that was great. Now we know where we're at and we'll build from there.'" 

McCue never considered dropping Tom as a client because of his disability. He just has one rule for all of his clients: 

"I told him, as long as you're willing to fail, I am more than willing to help you because failure is part of the process of fitness, regardless of whether you have a disability or not," he said. 

Bish and McCue spent the first couple years of their training together working on very basic exercises. 

"It was probably two years before we even picked up a barbell to try lifting or anything like that," Bish said. 

"It never crossed my mind to even try dead lifting, squatting or bench pressing. I'd never done a bench press in my life, and I was 60 years old by then." 

After a few years of training, McCue suggested that Bish attempt a power-lifting competition. 

"He was doing so well with his movements and his compound movements that I wanted to find a way to set bigger goals for him," McCue said. "Sometimes when you're just working out without an endgame, it can get pretty monotonous because there's no clear end; fitness is a lifestyle. I thought a power-lifting competition would challenge him and help take his training to a new level." 

"He just thought it'd be a good experience for me," Bish added. "I was doing the dead lifting, and then we learned how to do squats, which was terrifying at first, and we did our first [power-lifting] competition in June 2023."

Unfortunately for Tom, and others like him, there aren’t a lot of adaptive male athletes in their 60s who want to compete in power lifting.

Undeterred, Tom agreed to continue to compete against able-bodied athletes. And, in 2024, Bish set Connecticut state records in all the major lifts in the Masters 3 category of the United States Powerlifting Association (USPA), which encompasses men between the ages of 60-69. 

Bish squatted 203.5 pounds, bench pressed 203.5 pounds and deadlifted 220 pounds for a total of 627 pounds, all state records. 

The guy who was told he’d never be able to walk normally – let alone perform intense lower-body exercises – became a Connecticut state champion in power lifting. 

"I'm competing in that category against all men with two legs. As far as I know, I'm the only one in Connecticut that's adaptive," Bish explained. 

The record-setting performance had an impact on McCue, too. 

"It's often surprising to me how much of an impact I make on my clients' lives. I don't often think of my job as having a major impact on people," McCue said. "But when I see clients succeed, especially at something they never thought they'd be able, it makes me feel very humble about what I do." 

Of course, if you’ve learned anything about Tom Bish from this story, you can guess that he wasn’t satisfied with simply setting a few state records. 

Bish plans to compete in a regional power-lifting meet in 2025, which OutKick will cover and continue to document his journey. 

Unsurprisingly, Tom’s faith plays a major role in his life. He wrote a book about his health journey, aptly titled, When the Touch of God Hurts.

"When the Touch of God Hurts tells the story of one man's journey through the world of life-threatening illnesses and how he found God's strength and peace to see him safely through. This book is not just about surviving hardships and trials, it is about thriving in the face of adversity and pain," reads the book’s description on Amazon. 

That’s the perfect way to describe Tom Bish. He’s a deeply faithful man who strives to not simply tolerate his disability, but to show the world that he can thrive in the face of incredible tribulation. 

"This last amputation, coming on the heels of losing my wife, was probably the roughest challenge in my life because it took a year and a half before I was walking anywhere confidently," Bish said.

"I was struggling with everything. But my faith teaches that God has a plan and that God is good. That was my wife's favorite saying, ‘God is always good.’

"I just decided I needed to embrace that because my frustration, my anger wasn't going to change. I wasn't going to grow a new leg. I could be as mad as I wanted, but it wasn't going to change my life. I just didn't want to be miserable like that anymore. And so, as best I could, I just yielded it over and told God, ‘I trust you.’" 

In addition to all the things Tom is working on to improve his own quality of life, he uses his experience to help others. 

Bish became an "amputee peer visitor," where he speaks to new amputees about the journey they're going to face and tries to provide them with hope – something that's difficult for anyone who experiences this traumatic loss.  

"I go in [to the hospital] and just sit down and talk with this brand-new amputee and walk them through the process, let them see the prosthesis, and let them ask any questions they want," he explained. 

"I never realized there were so many people in the world that were in this same situation and I have some answers and some hope and get to help them out." 

One particular story stands out to him. 

"I walked into a hospital room the day before Thanksgiving a couple of years ago. A man my age, who'd been an athlete all of his life and a marathon runner… became an above-the-knee amputee," Bish recounted. 

"I walked into the room to shake hands and introduce myself to him, and his wife came flying over. She threw her arms around me and hugged me and started crying, said, ‘thank you, thank you, thank you.’ And I said, ‘What for?’ 

"She said, 'I just needed to know my husband's going to be able to walk again… You just got me through this.' And I'm thinking, 'Lord, this is what it's all about.'" 

Bish told me that he hopes his story will inspire at least one other person, which is why he wanted me to tell it. 

Well, he can set the bar higher than one person, because I can tell you that I'm inspired by Tom Bish every day.