We explicitly describe the best approximation in geodesic submanifolds of positive definite matrices obtained from involutive congruence transformations on the Cartan-Hadamard manifold ${\mathrm{Sym}}(n,{\Bbb R})^{++}$ of positive definite matrices. An explicit calculation for the minimal distance function from the geodesic submanifold ${\mathrm{Sym}}(p,{\mathbb R})^{++}\times {\mathrm{Sym}}(q,{\mathbb R})^{++}$ block diagonally embedded in ${\mathrm{Sym}}(n,{\mathbb R})^{++}$ is given in terms of metric and spectral geometric means, Cayley transform, and Schur complements of positive definite matrices when $p\leq 2$ or $q\leq 2.$