There's a reason why you don't see many gym selfies taken during shoulder exercises: lip snarls.
The horrendous gym face is involuntary, and happens to almost everyone, says Bill Hartman, P.T., C.S.C.S., owner of Indianapolis Sports and Fitness Training. It's your body's way of trying to make you stronger during movements like the lateral raise, upright row, overhead press, and pullup.
Imagine your head and neck as a column. The stronger and more anchored it is, the more efficiently and forcefully your arm and shoulder muscles can lift and lower the load around it, explains Hartman.
But as you perform these upper-body exercises, your traps, lats, delts, or rotator cuff muscles pull your head and neck from side to side. As a result, your column weakens and you can't lift the weight as easily. So in order to stop this pulling, your body causes your jaw to shift, he says.
Related: The 11 Best Traps Exercises
Why adjust your jaw, and not, say, squeeze one eye shut? Here's the cool body science behind it: For the majority of people, your bottom and top jaws are not perfectly aligned. It's usually not visible to the naked eye, says Hartman. 

However, your brain knows this asymmetry exists. And in order to produce as stable of a pillar as possible, your brain shifts your bottom to align as closely as possible with the top so it's temporarily symmetrical, he says. Because of this, the muscles around your mouth move, creating an unintentional snarl.
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Try this the next time you perform a shoulder exercise: Stay expressionless. "I'll bet you can't lift the weight," Hartman says. Then, let your face do whatever the heck it wants on your next rep. "You'll likely be able to pick it up," he says. 

Suddenly that horrible lip curl seems a little more attractive. Go ahead and let us see your #beautifulsnarl.
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