You should NOT base your carb intake on your insulin dose, which is what guys did for years and is the WRONG way to look at it. Consuming the smallest amount of carbs required to cover your insulin dose is a good way to KILL your gains. Now, pre-contest is a different story, as fat loss is the priority, but when it comes to off-season mass-building, consuming only enough carbs to cover your insulin dose is going to be horribly insufficient in almost all cases.
Think about it. The average off-season bodybuilder will consume between 400-800 grams of carbs per day, and with 1/3rd to 1/2 of his daily carbs consumed during the training window (the training window ranges from the start of training until a few hours afterward). That is a lot of carbs--between 133 to 500 grams.
Not a single bodybuilder who requires 400-800 grams of carbs per day is going to be able to maximize recovery and growth by consuming only 50-75 grams of carbs during the training window. Yet, I see guys doing it all the time--because they are trying to match their carb intake to their insulin dose. They don't want to consume one more gram than is necessary to cover their 10 IU, or 15 IU, or whatever it is. That is idiotic. Why consume an insufficient amount of carbs just because you chose to use 10 IU, or 15 IU of insulin?
So, rather than basing your carb intake on your insulin dose, you should base your insulin dose on your carb intake. Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean you should take as much insulin as you possibly can without going hypo, but it does mean your carb intake should be optimized first, after which you are free to determine your insulin dose.
Lots of guys will use 10-15 IU of Humulin R pre-training, but with optimal carb intake being so board, using some predetermined ratio is completely freaking senseless!!!!
The only time you should use a predetermined ratio is when fat loss is the priority and you have progressed far enough in your diet to where your carb intake is low. For example, if someone is dieting hard and only eating 150 grams of carb per day, they might only be consuming 50-100 grams of carbs during the training window. Therefore, they will need to make sure their slin dose is not too high for their carb intake. This is the only time ratios come into play.
In the off-season, when trying to grow, ratios have no place, as basically everyone will be consuming way more than enough carbs to cover their slin dose. As another example, if someone is consuming 300 grams of carbs during the off-season training window and using Humulin R, they could chose to use 10 IU, 20 IU, 30 IU, etc (Note: there are numerous factors which determine optimal dose). Regardless of which dose they select, their carb intake will still be high enough to cover it (assuming they are spreading their carbs out throughout the entire window, like they should be).
This means ratios could be all over the place from one person to the next. You could have 3 guys, all of whom consume 300 grams of carbs during the training window, but one guy might use 10 IU of slin, another 20 IU, and another 30 IU. Their ratios would be 30:1, 15:1, and 10:1, respectively, but all of them would still be consuming the correct amount of carbs to maximize recovery and growth. The only variable is how much slin they chose to use, which again, was completely independent of their carb intake.
This shows why ratios don't mean shit. The bodybuilder's carb intake is predetermined. Just because he uses a certain insulin dose, it doesn't mean he should start changing his carb intake because his carb intake was determined based on his metabolic needs, while his slin dose was based on a variety of factors, such as insulin sensitivity, level of comfort, etc.
Of course, all this is assuming that the bodybuilder never uses more insulin than his carb intake can handle. To that I respond by saying--an off-season bodybuilder should NEVER NEED to use more insulin that what his carb intake can handle. Off-season carb intake is already so high that using an insulin dose beyond that would be completely unnecessary.
Note: All of this is based on the use of regular human insulin (Humulin R/Novolin R) immediately pre-training. RHI stays active the entire training window, so all the carbs a bodybuilder eats during that time (which includes his peri-workout nutrition and his post-workout whole-food meal) will be available to the insulin.
If using fast-acting insulin pre-training, everything changes, as its peak activity is only a couple hours--maybe 3. While Humlin will release over 5-6 hours, giving the bodybuilder plenty of time to consume his 1/3rd to 1/2 of his daily carbs, but this is not the case with fast-acting insulins. A bodybuilder would need to consume all his carbs within the short time it is active, and very few bodybuilders should be eating that many carbs within just a couple hour period. The bodybuilder would be so bloated during training from all the carbs, he couldn't even train properly. For this reason, fast-acting insulin doses are typically much lower--about 50% of a Humulin R/ Novolin r dose.
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