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Matthew Tung formed Northeastern’s weightlifting club before going on to become the first person from Hong Kong in over a decade to compete in an international weightlifting competition.
When Matthew Tung came to Northeastern, he’d just won his first weightlifting competition in high school.
Now, a year after graduating, he’s become the first person from Hong Kong in over a decade to compete internationally in weightlifting, placing fifth in the Asian Weightlifting Championships.
“That was a big event for me in terms of weightlifting,” said Tung, who’s now living in southern California and studying to be a physical therapist. “I’ve never competed on a scale like that. Most of the competitions I’ve done have been very local. The Asian Championships is the first big international competition I’ve done. It was very surreal. It felt like a culmination of everything I’ve done before that.”
Tung graduated from Northeastern in 2023 with a degree in health sciences. After graduating, he decided to take a gap year before applying to school to become a physical therapist. During this time, he decided to take a job as a research assistant at the Hong Kong Sports Institute, a national training facility for professional athletes. Tung worked with the national fencing team that went on to win a gold medal for Hong Kong, one of two the country would get during the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.
He also used this time to train. Tung won a couple of local meets in Hong Kong before training for the Asian Weightlifting Championships held this past February in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. He placed fifth, competing against 230 weightlifters from 34 countries. His goal is to get to the 2025 Asian Championships next, and from there, the 2026 Asian Games.
When it comes to weightlifting, Tung is mostly self taught. He was first introduced to the sport when training for baseball when he was in high school. But his school didn’t have a weightlifting team, so he took on training as a solo endeavor, practicing before or after school.
“I was just going through YouTube, looking through tips to get me stronger and I came across the sport of Olympic weightlifting,” he said. “Just looking at all these compilation videos, I just decided to give it a go myself. … I bought books, watched tutorials, and then I would go to the gym by myself and film myself, watch the film, and try to make corrections.”
When training for the Asian Championships, Tung used an artificial intelligence program to help him train. It was made by a weightlifting coach and generates a program to help lifters get to where they need to be by a competition, based on their current lifting stats. Tung would input his numbers and it would give him new lifts to hit each date.
“I like the AI program because my schedule is always changing, so it’s very flexible and adaptive,” Tung said. “It learns more about you the more you use it. I would much rather have an in-person coach, but I think AI is the next best thing.”
While Tung has never had an official coach, he said he’s had many mentors over the years, including Cheryl Hayworth, who coached Northeastern’s weightlifting team. He also got a chance to meet some of the people he watched training on YouTube at the Asian Championships.
“That was a full circle moment,” he said. “I got to see the people that actually got me into the sport and got to talk to them a little bit. That was probably my favorite part of the competition was meeting all my heroes from way back when.”
When Tung arrived at Northeastern, he found there was a powerlifting team, but no weightlifting team. Powerlifting is less technical and more strength-based, Tung said, focused around the bench press, the squat and the deadlift. It’s more popular than weightlifting, which is an Olympic sport.
So Tung and one of his friends decided to form a weightlifting team at Northeastern in 2021. He was able to use some of his skills from self-training to help coach people on the weightlifting team.
Since starting, the team has gone from having two people qualify for national university competitions to having over 10 people qualify. Tung said they’ve actually started to even hold tryouts.
“Not a lot of people knew that there was a weightlifting team because the powerlifting team has been so popular and successful at Northeastern,” Tung said. “But they would recommend over to us (the people who didn’t make the power lifting team.) And then they ended up joining and now it’s their life.”