I have one other newbie question. I know that running with weights/sleds or constantly doing hill sprints are bad because they force you to run slow, so they should be used for acceleration development purposes. But considering the best possible way to sprint fast is to wear spikes and run downhill, shouldn’t we always wear spikes and sprint downhill? After all, wearing running shoes and running on a flat plane is much slower, so we’d be forcing our muscles to run slower than it should.
You still have to go through proper progressions with regard to sprint training and not just use one method because its deemed as the best method. If all you did was downhill sprint training in spikes you’d probably plateau pretty fast and/or get hurt because you didn’t do anything prior to that to progress to it.