Youth and junior career Lu, from the eastern province of
Zhejiang, first took up
athletics while at primary school and her talent for long jumping was noticed. She continued with the discipline in the region, joining the provincial level athletics club and went on to study at
Zhejiang University. Lu established herself at national level in 2008 when she won the Chinese Olympic trials event, improving a personal best by a large margin with a jump of . At fifteen, she was the youngest athlete in the field and defeated Asian indoor champion
Chen Yaling, but had not performed well enough to earn qualification. She was the world's number one ranked long jumper in the
youth category in 2009 and claimed the gold medal at the
2009 World Youth Championships in Athletics with a jump of . She again defeated Chen in Chinese competition, winning the
2009 Chinese Games title with an Asian youth record mark of . In her first senior international competition she performed less well, but still managed a bronze medal at
2009 East Asian Games while Chen was the winner. She was the second highest ranked Asian woman that year, after Korea's
Jung Soon-ok. She made her global senior debut at the
2010 IAAF World Indoor Championships, still seventeen years old, and set an indoor best of in qualifying. She had her season's best jump of at the
2010 Asian Junior Athletics Championships, where she comfortably won the gold medal. She also shared in the
4×100 metres relay silver medal with
Chen Lin,
Jiang Shan, and
Wu Shuijiao (having been upgraded from bronze after Kazakhstan was disqualified). In her last major performance of the year, she placed sixth at the
2010 Asian Games, clearing which was 17 cm short of Jung Soon-ok's winning result. Lu won her first national title at the
Chinese Athletics Championships that year.
Asian senior medals At the start of the 2011 indoor season she set an indoor best of to win in
Nanjing. Going into the outdoor season, she was runner-up on countback to Japan's
Saeko Okayama at the
Golden Grand Prix in
Kawasaki. Her outdoor best that year came in national competition in
Jinan, where she won with a jump of . She was close to this at the
2011 Asian Athletics Championships, a mark of being the best of her series, and was ahead of Okayama but beaten into second place by
Mayookha Johny. Afterwards, she defended her national title at the Chinese Championships. She won her first senior title at the
2012 Asian Indoor Athletics Championships, beating Kazakhstan's
Anastassya Kudinova to the gold. Turning to the outdoor track and field circuit, she missed the
Shanghai Golden Grand Prix meeting, but made her
IAAF Diamond League at the
Prefontaine Classic in the United States, finishing tenth. She was herself beaten into second at the following leg in
Bangkok by Uzbek
Juliya Tarasova. She struggled the following year, failing to register a mark beyond six metres, and lost her title at the
12th National Games of China by ending the contest in eleventh place. Lu returned to action in the 2014 season with her first appearance at the Shanghai Diamond League (coming tenth) and a third-place finish at the
IAAF World Challenge Beijing. With her season's best of she ranked in the top fifty globally that year and was joint best Asian athlete alongside her compatriot
Jiang Yanfei. Building on her silver from four years earlier, on home soil in
Wuhan Lu won the long jump title at the
2015 Asian Athletics Championships by a five-centimetre margin over South Korea's Jung Soon-ok. ==Personal bests==