Chicago Bears head coach Ben Johnson arrived to the team last year with an mindset that he was going to reawaken a “sleeping giant” and brought forth an intense coaching style that few expected to see from the coach deemed a just young offensive wizard.

It’s the exact kind of mindset the Bears needed after being led by a lackadaisical approach for years under previous regimes with little to no accountability. Coming in with that kind of mindset from Day 1 can ruffle some feathers, including with some veteran players, but the Bears roster soon started to buy into the message Johnson was sharing, because it was real.

Now, one year later, it’s completely rewired how the players in Chicago carry themselves and people have taken notice, both inside and outside of Halas Hall.

Ben Johnson’s intense coaching style paid dividends for how his players operate, even one year later

To get a firsthand evidence of that, here’s what former five-time Pro Bowl offensive tackle Terron Armstead had to say this week about what impressed him the most from working with five Chicago Bears offensive linemen this summer.

“You can definitely see the identity of the Bears, Ben Johnson, what he’s bringing in and what he’s brought with that culture,” Armstead said on the Bears Etc. podcast. “You can definitely see the intention that these guys have. It’s been a joy to train. It’s easy. They go about it the right way, they show up on time, they’re flying around, they’re hungry to learn and get another rep.”

That’s the kind of praise you want to hear in regards to an offensive linemen when it comes to their work ethic and how they go about business. The Bears have wired those players the right way, even with players like Theo Benedet and Kiran Amegadjie who aren’t projected starters but still earned similar praise from Armstead.

But, that kind of approach even goes beyond just the offensive, or defensive, linemen. That energy extends to the entire roster, as Johnson himself explained.

“I don’t care if you’re a lineman, which is [who] you normally think of [being] physical, but also our receivers and our DBs, between the blocking and the tackling, [being physical has] got to show up in terms of how they do things fundamentally,” Johnson said.

That level of physicality matters going into training camp and joint practices, just ask the Miami Dolphins

The day the Bears really understood how demanding Johnson would be in regards to creating team physicality and an intense work ethic in his players came on Aug 5, one day after a sloppy practice in front of a stadium packed with eager fans. That next day at practice was the team’s most grueling session of the summer in which Johnson planned two hours of live tackling and short-yardage situations out in the August heat. The message was clear after that day.

“I feel like we should practice like that every day,” cornerback Tyrique Stevenson said after that specific practice. “That’s the message the team shot to us. The coaching staff and everybody, that’s what we need to see out there everyday to be a championship defense and a championship offense.”

That practice bonded the team and instilled that intense mindset into every single player, to the point that three days later in a joint practice against the Miami Dolphins, a few players took offense to then intensity Johnson’s squad was operating with on the field.

“That first joint practice with Chicago, I feel like that was some B.S., because they were out there tackling and this and that,” Miami Dolphins center Aaron Brewer explained. “So it was like fake physicality. If they out there playing tackle football and everybody else was out there playing 7-on-7 or something, like, it’s fake physicality. You kind of seen that when we went out there and played in a real game.”

It wasn’t fake, in fact it was far from it. What the Bears showed that day and carried throughout the rest of the year couldn’t have been more real.

“The buy-in was incredible,” general manager Ryan Poles said after the 2025-26 season. “I go back to training camp. He needed a physical day in the dog days of camp, and that was a really cool opportunity to see those guys buy into what he was saying, do something really hard. In the moment, does it feel good? No. But they believed, from his message, that it would help us down the road. And they went all out with it. And you saw that go through the entire season.”

It’s an approach that paid off in a major way and changed the culture of an entire organization. The Bears saw it, the league saw it, and people outside the NFL saw it. It’s something that hasn’t changed and Johnson is making sure it isn’t going to either.