By Edward Chaykovsky

This coming Friday night, WBA/IBO junior middleweight champion Erislandy Lara (23-2-2, 13 KOs) is planning to take matters into his own hands by blasting out former titleholder Yuri Foreman (34-2, 10 KOs) as early as possible.

Their contest takes place at the Hialeah Park Racing & Casino in Miami (Spike, 9 p.m. ET/PT).

“I feel motivation to make it an early slugfest type of knockout,” Lara told Premier Boxing Champions. “I've proven I'm one of the best, and I've been active [in] fighting the best competition that will step in the ring with me.”

The fight will be Lara's first since winning a twelve round decision in his rematch with Vanes Martirosyan last May at the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas.

Five of Lara's last six fights have gone the distance. The Cuban boxer wants to change things by scoring more knockouts inside the distance. Because of Lara's fighting style, some of his fights have become difficult to score and that led to a very close, and some felt controversial, split decision defeat to Saul "Canelo" Alvarez in 2014.

“The Canelo-Lara fight was illustrative of how difficult it is to score on Lara,” PBC was told by Showtime boxing analyst and historian Steve Farhood, who had Lara beating Canelo, 115-113.

“It was the perfect example of a boxer who doesn’t get hit much and doesn’t commit to punching much, and an aggressor who was mostly ineffective. I don’t think Canelo landed three punches to the head the whole fight.”

Unless a high profile fight or unification comes up, the contest with Foreman could become Lara's last fight at the junior middleweight limit. Lara is already targeting a potential move to middleweight - where he'd like to land a contest with WBC, WBA, IBO, IBF world champion Gennady "GGG" Golovkin. Lara has tried, in multiple interviews, to bait Golovkin into a fight.