EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. -- At the end of last season, Minnesota Vikings coach Mike Zimmer said the team's fall from a 5-0 start to an 8-8 record would lead him into a period of "soul-searching" as he tried to pinpoint what went wrong.

"I met with a lot of people this offseason, a number of head coaches, talked to them about how I can do things better," he said Friday.

The upshot of that stretch of self-examination, apparently, is that the Vikings need to be tougher.

Zimmer said he plans to set a more exacting standard in his fourth season, returning to the way he'd coached at the start of his tenure in Minnesota. The Vikings went 11-5 and won the NFC North in 2015, but saw their 5-0 record dissolve in a tempest of injuries, confounding performances and late-game losses in 2016.

"Going into last season, part of my whole goal was, I thought we had a pretty good football team and I wanted to make sure we got to the first game healthy," Zimmer said. "And so maybe I was a little bit cautious in some of the things. We're going to get back to being the Vikings. We're going to be blue-collar, and we're going to do the things that got us to be, where we played teams, that they respected the way we played."

Does that mean more physical practices?

"Quite honestly, I don't care how long practices goes. If the schedule says two hours, and I'm not happy about it, we're going to go 2:30. I don't care. We're going to do it until I feel good about it."

Is the coach worried about players pushing back?

"No," he said. "They're not going to push back."

It remains to be seen how the Vikings will work during organized team activities later this month, their mandatory minicamp in June and training camp in July, but Zimmer sounded intent on changing expectations on Friday.

Riki Ellison, the former NFL linebacker and father of former Vikings tight end Rhett Ellison, said in a series of social media posts this spring that the Vikings' overly taxing practices led to players being tired at the end of last season, but later deleted the remarks and did not respond to Zimmer's attempts to discuss the comments with him. Several players said, though, they didn't attribute the Vikings' fall to fatigue, pinning it instead on the workload carried by a defense that often was asked to make game-saving stops or create turnovers in the fourth quarter.

In any case, Zimmer sounded ready to push his team harder this season, in hopes that the Vikings' reboot can come through a rededication to their old ways of doing things.