[Andrew Bollard]

High/max rep pushups, in my experience, carry a huge global fatigue cost. It’s not just your tris, pecs and delts that are being worked through the horizontal pressing motion; you’re also maintaining full body tension through your legs, core and back. So you’ll have more DOMS than with a 3×4 protocol, which could impact your aerobic capacity training if you’re too sore to train.

Max rep calisthenics like this have either a hypertrophy or muscular endurance effect, depending on how strong/muscular/experienced you are. They definitely don’t have a maximal strength effect, which is what a 3×4 protocol usually is. Hypertrophy is generally to be avoided for mountain sports unless you’re extremely frail and undermuscled, as unnecessary muscle weight is just as bad as unecessary fat weight. Muscular endurance is desirable, but only after having maximised maximal strength and aerobic capacity for a given training block. It shouldn’t be mixed with a max strength phase and/or an aerobic capacity building phase, so mixing high rep pushups with other low rep, heavy weight, long rest period movements is a big no-no.

So, to answer your question: yes, there is a disadvantage in that you’ll be creating a completely different training stimulus.